Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027 shortlist revealed

Hoda Afshar, Lotus L Kang, Sasha Kurmaz and Salvatore Vitale have been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027, one of the most significant awards in contemporary photography, with a £30,000 prize for the winner. The announcement of the victor will come in April 2027.

The prize recognises artists from anywhere in the world for exhibitions or books in Europe that have made a significant contribution to photography in the preceding year. Work from the four shortlisted projects will go on display at The Photographers' Gallery in London from 10 March to 6 June 2027. The exhibition then travels to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn/Frankfurt, where it runs from 19 June to 26 September 2027.

The shortlist spans four countries of birth, three continents of exhibition and publication, and a striking range of methods. Each project stretches photography into installation, archive, collage and critique.

Who are the shortlisted artists?

Hoda Afshar, born in 1983 in Tehran, Iran, is nominated for the exhibition Performing the Invisible at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. The show used images, drawings, videos, mirrors and sound to interrogate photography's role in colonialism — and as a tool for resistance. At its centre sat The Fold, a work built on the archive of French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934) and the thousands of photographs of veiled individuals, mostly women, that he made in Morocco.

"Such archives are never about the subject," Afshar told the British Journal of Photography in its December 2025 issue. "They're about the purpose the colonial photography was serving – to classify, to justify colonisation." Her Paris exhibition added further elements such as video interviews.

Sasha Kurmaz, born in 1986 in Kyiv, Ukraine, is shortlisted for the publication Red Horse, published by Éditions Images Vevey in November 2025. Kurmaz began the project after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. His 800-page publication gathers handmade collages, documentary photographs, notes, drawings and newspaper cuttings into a diaristic account of wartime experience — and a reflection on whether photography can communicate that experience at all.

"Red Horse is not just a photography book, it is a deeply personal story of my life, documented and embodied through artistic means," Kurmaz has stated. In the book he writes: "War is a machine for turning personalities into abstraction." Designed by Nicholas Polli, Red Horse won the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.

Salvatore Vitale, born in 1986 in Palermo, Italy, is nominated for the exhibition SABOTAGE at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland (6 March–31 May 2026). The exhibition questions systems of automation and surveillance by collaborating with the precariously employed people who sustain that economy. Working with South African freelancers, Vitale examines how digital infrastructures reproduce historical and colonial patterns of extraction, exploitation and inequality — and how photography can reveal and critique this system while also forming part of the problem.

"This kind of analysis is very much in relation to understanding what kind of act of sabotage – even if very subtle – can exist," Vitale told BJP in March 2026. "It doesn't have to be activism, but how can we build different narratives or look at those topics from different perspectives?"

Lotus L Kang, born in 1985 in Toronto, Canada, is shortlisted for The face of desire is loss, shown in the Bulgari Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (9 May–22 November 2026). Combining photography, film and sculpture, the exhibition immersed viewers in lengths of unfixed photographic film — which Kang calls 'skins' — suspended from steel joists. It also included 49 bottles of spirits, representing the days a soul spends between death and rebirth in Buddhist belief, alongside sculptures of tatami mats and cast objects in plaster, bronze and fibreglass depicting crying birds and kelp knots. Together, the elements evoked the body in states of rest, dream, recovery and death, symbolising the flux of life and impermanence.

What does the shortlist say about photography now?

The 2027 edition marks the 30th anniversary of the prize. Shoair Mavlian, director of The Photographers' Gallery and voting chair of the jury, framed the shortlist in those terms.

"As we reach the 30th anniversary of the prize giving, the 2027 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize shortlist represents the expansiveness of photography and how it's used to explore ideas of resistance, conflict, memory and identity in our contemporary age," Mavlian commented.

The jury comprised:

• Laia Abril, multidisciplinary artist
• Damarice Amao, associate curator for photography at the Musée National d'Art Moderne / Centre Pompidou
• Verónica Fieiras, artist, editor and publisher (CHACO)
• Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
• Shoair Mavlian, director of The Photographers' Gallery, as voting chair

What does this change for audiences? For one, a single London venue will now hold colonial archives, war diaries, surveillance critiques and immersive film sculpture in adjacent rooms — a compressed map of where the medium is heading. Visitors can see the shortlist at The Photographers' Gallery from 10 March to 6 June 2027, before the April 2027 winner's announcement settles which of these four trajectories the jury judges most consequential.