The Photographers' Gallery, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025
If you’ve ever been to the Photographers’ Gallery, tucked away on Ramillies Street, 100 metres from Oxford Circus tube station, you’ll likely have seen their wonky captions.
Taking advantage of the free Friday admission after 5pm, I am once again reminded why this is my favourite art gallery in London.
Part of what I love about the space is not only its affordability (even on other days, tickets are never north of a tenner), but how much they cram into such a small space – and, like slightly off-kilter captions, you can see the team‘s influence throughout.
I recommend starting on the fifth floor and working your way down. On the top floor are displays from two of the four finalists for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize: Cristina De Middel and Rahim Fortune. Started at the Photographers’ Gallery in 1996, the prize is recognised as the largest and most prestigious prize of its kind in Europe: kind of like the Oscars, but for contemporary photography.
Cristina De Middel Journey to the Centre
De Middel sets out in her work to renarrativise the story of Southern and Central American immigrants as they make their way northwards which, according to the accompanying caption, allows her to reposition it ‘as a heroic and daring journey, rather than a desperate escape’. The display features some breathtaking blown-up environmental portrait photographs of these people, which capture the ephemera - these travellers’ possessions - that the artist has found en route.
Though inevitably serious in tone, there are also moments of light relief in De Middel’s work. The artist’s bemusement at the hypothetical destination for these travellers, Felicity, California, self-proclaimed ‘Center of the World’, which was the inspiration for her project. The artist pulls no punches, calling this a ‘hollow’ construct, the mythical end-point of ‘an outdated adventure book’.
Rahim Fortune Hardtack
In a video interview playing on a screen in a side room, Rahim Fortune talks about his interactions with the Black community in Texas, and the meaning behind Hardtack. The elders from his community trace their lineage to buffalo soldiers in the South of the United States. His hope: that visitors to his show ‘can see a part of Texas that isn’t so much in the public imagination’.
Taken against backdrops not unlike those found in season 1 of True Detective, featuring the Black community’s life, work, celebration and faith, the links to exploitation are inescapable. A photograph of an abandoned plantation here, a house on East MLK Blvd there. Fortune’s work pays homage to this history.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa I carry Her photo with Me
On the fourth floor, photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s recalls a deeply intimate personal and family history. I carry Her photo with Me began when he happened across a family portrait with his sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. She doesn’t appear in the family’s albums because she disappeared for some years, and when she returned, she didn’t want her photo taken. She died shortly afterwards.The moving series of photographs and scrapbooks navigates his trauma after he was injured in a serious traffic accident and the death of his estranged sister.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025 runs at The Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW, until Sunday 15 June.