The cost of beauty - Alfredo Jaar and Valérie Belin

Valérie Belin and Alfredo Jaar join curator Brandei Estes to explore how beauty can confront uncomfortable truths. Taking their Prix Pictet winning series as a starting point, they discuss photography’s power to address consumption, environmental loss and human impact, and ask whether seductive images can make us look more closely at the world around us.

Brandei Estes – Valérie Belin, Alfredo Jaar

Presented by Prix Pictet

About the speakers

Born in 1964 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Valérie Belin is a French visual artist whose photographic practice explores light, materiality, the body and their transformations. Influenced by Minimalism and Conceptual Art, she works in photographic series. She received the Prix Pictet in 2015, was named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2022 and elected to the Académie des beaux-arts in 2024. She lives and works in Paris.

Artist, architect and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar lives and works in Lisbon. His work has been presented at several editions of the Venice and São Paulo Biennales, as well as Documenta in Kassel. He has created over 70 public interventions, and his work is held in the collections of MoMA, Tate and the Centre Pompidou. He received the Hasselblad Award in 2020 and the Prix Pictet in 2025.

Curator and photography market specialist Brandei Estes is Acting Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Formerly Head of Photographs at Sotheby’s for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she has over 20 years of experience in the international photography market. She also works as an independent curator and advisor, organizing exhibitions, advising collectors and lecturing.

Valérie Belin,Still Life with Mirror, 2014 – Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels