Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025 Shortlist revealed

This long-standing annual Prize, originally established in 1996, identifies and rewards artists for their projects that have made a significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months. Over its 28-year history, the Prize has become renowned as one of the most important international awards for contemporary photographers, spotlighting outstanding, innovative and thought-provoking work.

The 2025 shortlisted projects feature documentary photography, constructed images, self- portraiture, performance and family archives. Themes of migration, community and belonging, intergenerational traditions and rituals, family memories and photographic histories are brought together in a powerful shortlist which highlights some of the influential work shown or published in Europe in the past year.

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery on 15 May 2025, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000. Full details of the Prize exhibition and award evening will be announced in early 2025.

The 2025 shortlisted artists and projects are:

Cristina De Middel (b. 1975, Spain) is shortlisted for the exhibition Journey to the Center at Les Rencontres De La Photographie, Arles, France (1 July – 25 August 2024).

The exhibition presents the Central American migration route across Mexico as a heroic and daring journey, rather than a desperate escape. De Middel borrows the atmosphere and structure of the Jules Verne book, Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The journey begins in Tapachula on the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala, and ends in Felicity, a small town in California which officially claims the absurd title ‘Center of the World’. The border fence is visible from Felicity which adds to the dystopic disappointment of the journey, where the final destination is no more than a roadside tourist attraction.

De Middel combines straight documentary photography with constructed images and archival material. She uses multi-layered narratives to reflect the complexity of human migration today; countering how it is often portrayed simplistically in the media and official reports.

Rahim Fortune (b. 1994, USA) is shortlisted for the book Hardtack, published by Loose Joints in 2024.

Hardtack is an unleavened bread made with flour, water and salt that was typical of the southern states of America during the Civil War era. Due to its extremely long shelf life, hardtack is long associated with survivalism and land migration. Fortune draws on this as a metaphor for the enduring nature of Black culture and traditions. Hardtack uncovers the roots that tie Fortune's native landscape to the conflicts and nuances associated with the post-emancipation Americas.

Fortune borrows from the language of vernacular and archival photography to interrogate the historical relationship of his community to photography; rooted in the landscape. The subjects of his striking portraits of coming-of-age traditions – young bull-riders, praise dancers and pageant queens – all inherit and gracefully embrace these community rituals. Fortune pays tribute to the rigour, discipline and creative flair of these cultural performances, alongside the intergenerational conversation between young people and elders handing down these traditions. In Hardtack, Fortune weaves documentary and personal history in a sincere expression of love and passion to the region which has nourished him personally and creatively.

Tarrah Krajnak (b.1979, Peru) is shortlisted for the exhibition Shadowings. A Catalogue of Attitudes for Estranged Daughters at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. (28 October 2023 – 3 March 2024)

The Peruvian-American artist bends time and blurs the lines between staged self-portraiture and performance, self and other, fact and fiction. The nominated exhibition brings together her most important work spanning twenty years. Krajnak consistently uses the camera as a research tool and takes a conceptual approach to the rematerialisation of photography.

Krajnak is deeply invested in the craft and processes of photography. She continues to print all of her own photographs, using methods including pigment prints from colour film, silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes and anthotypes (images made using plant-based light-sensitive materials).

Krajnak’s own body appears often, and her production sites move between the studio, fieldwork and darkroom. Krajnak turns her lens to other photography, including work by the ‘masters’ of photography. She antagonises the received art historical canon by restaging these key works with her own bodily interventions.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b, 1995, South Africa) is shortlisted for the book I carry Her photo with Me, published by Mack Books in 2024.

The deeply personal project began when Sobekwa found a family portrait with his older sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. It remains the only photograph he has of her. One day when the siblings were seven and thirteen, she chased him and he was hit by a car and badly injured. She disappeared hours later, only returning a decade later, ill. By this time Sobekwa had become a photographer. He tried to take her portrait, but stopped when she reacted angrily. Ziyanda died soon after.

I carry Her photo with Me combines photographs, handwritten notes and family snapshots. Through this scrapbook-like publication Sobekwa explores the memory of his sister and the wider implications of such disappearances – a troubling part of South Africa’s history. The work is part of his wider practice on fragmentation, poverty and the long-reaching ramifications of apartheid and colonialism across all levels of South African society.

Main Image: Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025 Cristina De Middel, Rahim Fortune, Tarrah Krajnak and Lindokuhle Sobekwa.