Untitled, 2023. From the series Death by GPS, 2022–2026 © Salvatore Vitale.
Hoda Afshar, Lotus L Kang, Sasha Kurmaz and Salvatore Vitale are shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027
Hoda Afshar, Lotus L Kang, Sasha Kurmaz and Salvatore Vitale have been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027. Recognising artists from anywhere in the world for exhibitions or books in Europe which have made a significant contribution to photography in the preceding year, the award is celebrated for spotlighting outstanding and innovative work. The exhibition of selected work from the four artists’ shortlisted projects will be at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, from 10 March to 06 June 2027, before moving to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn/Frankfurt from 19 June to 26 September 2027. The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced in April 2027.
Hoda Afshar, who was born in 1983 in Tehran, Iran, is shortlisted for the exhibition Performing the Invisible at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, which used images, drawings, videos, mirrors and sound to interrogate photography’s role in colonialism, and as a tool for resistance. At the centre of the exhibition was The Fold, which worked with the archive of French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), and the thousands of photographs of veiled individuals – mostly women – he made in Morocco.
“Such archives are never about the subject,” Afshar told BJP in our December 2025 issue. “They’re about the purpose the colonial photography was serving – to classify, to justify colonisation.” Afshar’s exhibition in Paris added further elements such as video interviews.
“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”
– Shoair Mavlian
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 following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and his 800-page publication brings together handmade collages, documentary photographs, notes, drawings and newspaper cuttings to create a diaristic insight into the experience of war, and his reflection on how photography can – or cannot – communicate this experience to others.
“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. “War is a machine for turning personalities into abstraction,” he writes in Red Horse, which was designed by Nicholas Polli and won the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
Salvatore Vitale, born in 1986 in Palermo, Italy, is shortlisted for the exhibition SABOTAGE at Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (06 March–31 May 2026), which questions systems of automation and surveillance by collaborating with the precariously employed people working to sustain this economy. Working with South African freelancers, Vitale considers how digital infrastructures reproduce historical and colonial patterns of extraction, exploitation and inequality, and how photography can reveal and critique this system – but also be 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 exhibition The face of desire is loss, which was shown in the Bulgari Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Italy (09 May–22 November 2026). Combining photography, film and sculpture, this show immersed the viewer in lengths of unfixed photographic film – which Kang calls ‘skins’ – suspended from steel joists; it also included 49 bottles of spirits, which represent the days a soul spends between death and rebirth in Buddhist belief, as well as sculptures of tatami mats and cast objects in plaster, bronze and fibreglass depicting crying birds and kelp knots, evoking the body in states of rest, dream, recovery and death. Together they symbolise the flux of life and impermanence.
The jury for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027 was: 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, and Shoair Mavlian, director of The Photographers’ Gallery, as voting chair.
“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,” commented Mavlian on the shortlist.
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027 will be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery from 10 March–06 June 2027.