Afshar, Kang, Kurmaz and Vitale Make the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2027 Shortlist
The £30,000 prize shortlists an 800-page wartime diary from Kyiv, a Venice Biennale installation of unfixed film, an archive reworked with mirrors and a film on digital labour.
Friday, October 30, 2026/2 min read
One of the four shortlisted works for next year's Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is an 800-page book. Another is a Venice Biennale installation made partly of photographic film that changes colour as the light and humidity change. The shortlist for the 2027 prize, announced on 28 October, names Hoda Afshar, Lotus L. Kang, Sasha Kurmaz and Salvatore Vitale, according to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.
The winner receives £30,000 and will be announced on Thursday 29 April 2027. Each of the other three artists receives £5,000. The prize marks the 30th anniversary of its first prize giving next year.
Who is on the 2027 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize shortlist?
Hoda Afshar, born in Tehran in 1983, is nominated for Performing the Invisible, shown at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris from September 2025 to January 2026. Its centrepiece, The Fold, reworks the colonial photographic archive of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault's pictures of veiled women in Morocco, and uses mirrors to turn the act of looking back on the viewer.
Lotus L. Kang, born in Toronto in 1985, is nominated for The face of desire is loss, at the Bulgari Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale, which runs until 22 November. It combines photography, film and sculpture around bodies, memory and loss, with suspended "skins" of unfixed film that shift in colour over time. The Art Newspaper describes the approach as photography as sculpture.
Sasha Kurmaz, born in Kyiv in 1986, is nominated for Red Horse, published by Éditions Images Vevey in November 2025. The 800-page visual diary began after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and mixes handmade collage, documentary photographs, notes and found objects to portray daily life under war.
Salvatore Vitale, born in Palermo in 1986, is nominated for SABOTAGE, shown at Photo Elysée in Lausanne from March to May 2026. Developed with South African freelancers, it turns film, photography and sculpture on the hidden, precarious labour behind the digital economy, including automation and surveillance.
Where can you see the shortlisted work?
A selection will be shown at The Photographers' Gallery in London from 10 March to 6 June 2027, then at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn/Frankfurt from 19 June to 26 September 2027. The jury is Laia Abril, Damarice Amao of the Centre Pompidou, Verónica Fieiras, Anne-Marie Beckmann of the foundation, and Shoair Mavlian of The Photographers' Gallery, who votes as chair.
What does the shortlist say about photography now?
The pattern is clear even in a list of four. Three of the nominated projects were shown as exhibitions or installations and one as a book, and none is a conventional series of framed prints. Two, Afshar's and Vitale's, work directly on archives and on systems of extraction, and Kurmaz's book is a record of daily life kept under war.
The shortlist exhibition opens in London in March, and the winner is named in April, about six weeks before the show closes.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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