Weronika Gęsicka Near Dark. From the series ‘Encyclopaedia’, 2023-2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery
Opening 6 March at The Photographer’s Gallery, this year’s lens-based artists feature collaborative projects, installations, video and sound pieces, and experimental conceptual photography
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize will return to London this spring with a 2026 exhibition that reflects the shifting terrain of contemporary photography, from long-term documentary investigations to AI-manipulated imagery and immersive installations. Organised by The Photographers’ Gallery, the annual showcase opens on 6 March and runs until 7 June, bringing together four internationally recognised artists whose work interrogates power, memory, identity and truth.
Established in 1996, the Prize has become one of the most influential accolades in contemporary photography, recognising a body of work, whether exhibition or publication, that has made a significant contribution to the medium over the past 12 months. Over three decades, it has developed a reputation for identifying artists whose practices push at the boundaries of form and politics alike. This year’s shortlist underscores that tradition, highlighting collaborative projects, investigative documentary work and conceptual experiments that blur the line between fact and fiction.
The 2026 exhibition features Jane Evelyn Atwood, Weronika Gęsicka, Amak Mahmoodian and Rene Matić – four artists whose practices span continents and generations, yet converge around urgent social and cultural questions.
Jane Evelyn Atwood, born in New York in 1947, has been shortlisted for her publication Too Much Time / Trop de Peines, a revised bilingual reprint published in 2024 by Le Bec En L’Air. The work revisits her seminal project Too Much Time – Women in Prison, originally produced in 2000 following a decade-long investigation into women’s incarceration. Throughout the 1990s, Atwood gained rare access to forty prisons across nine countries, documenting the daily realities of female inmates with stark black-and-white intimacy.
Her images reveal systemic neglect: limited hygiene facilities, inadequate gynaecological and mental health care, and glaring inequalities compared with male prisoners. Atwood’s practice is rooted in sustained engagement and advocacy; she has continued to campaign for prisoners’ rights long after the project’s completion. The reissue arrives at a time when the global female prison population has risen dramatically since 2000, lending renewed urgency to her work’s unflinching exposure of institutional injustice.
In contrast, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka, born in 1984, approaches the instability of truth from a conceptual angle. She is shortlisted for Encyclopaedia, published in November 2024 by BLOW UP PRESS. The project draws on the curious phenomenon of fictitious entries inserted into reference books – so-called “trap streets” of the publishing world – originally intended to catch copyright infringements or serve as private jokes by editors.
Gęsicka collected hundreds of such fabricated definitions from historical encyclopaedias purchased at online auctions. She then reinterpreted them visually, using manipulated stock photography and AI-generated imagery to give form to these falsehoods. The result is both playful and unsettling. In an age saturated with information, where advertising, news and fiction often overlap, Encyclopaedia asks what it means to trust an image or a text. The work highlights how easily authority can be constructed and undermined suggesting that knowledge itself has become a fluid and contested space.
Themes of exile and belonging shape the work of Iranian-born artist Amak Mahmoodian, shortlisted for her exhibition One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, first shown at the Bristol Photo Festival in late 2024. Mahmoodian, born in Shiraz in 1980 and based in the UK since 2010, has been unable to return to Iran. Her project unfolds across photography, poetry, drawing and video, forming an immersive meditation on displacement.
Over six years, Mahmoodian collaborated with sixteen participants from fourteen countries, engaging them in conversations about recurring dreams and the psychological afterlife of migration. The title refers to the approximate amount of time adults and children spend dreaming each night. Through layered imagery and text, she gives visual shape to those dreams, positioning them as fragile bridges between past and present, homeland and exile. At a time of tightening borders and polarised politics, her work imagines a shared interior space that resists division.
The youngest artist on the shortlist, British artist Rene Matić, born in 1997, has been recognised for the exhibition AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, presented at CCA Berlin between November 2024 and February 2025. Matić’s multidisciplinary practice combines diaristic photography, installation and sound to explore identity, class, subculture and family. Snapshot-like images of everyday encounters are interwoven with collected objects and audio elements, producing a textured portrait of contemporary Britain.
Working amid a climate marked by rising right-wing populism and what they describe as “performative compassion,” Matić foregrounds intimacy and vulnerability as acts of resistance. Their practice dwells in what they call “rude(ness)” – an embrace of the in-between, where tenderness and defiance coexist.
Shoair Mavlian, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, said the 2026 shortlist “demonstrates the pertinent themes being investigated by photographers today,” noting that each artist challenges viewers to reconsider how stories are constructed and who has the authority to tell them.
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 14 May, with the remaining shortlisted artists each receiving £5,000. Following its London presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn/Frankfurt, where it will be on view from 3 September 2026 until 24 January 2027.
As the Prize approaches its 30th anniversary, the 2026 edition affirms its role as a barometer of photographic practice – attentive not only to aesthetic innovation, but to the political and emotional realities that shape life across borders, prisons, archives and homes.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize will be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery from 6 March and runs until 7 June