Rene Matić has been announced as the first British winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in more than a decade, collecting £30,000 for AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, an exhibition utilising photography, installation and sound to explore notions of identity and belonging in contemporary society.
The announcement was made at The Photographers’ Gallery at an evening ceremony on Thursday, 14 May, recognising the work that the international jury considered the most significant contribution to contemporary photography in Europe over the past 12 months. Matić was nominated for their exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts Berlin (CCA Berlin), which ran from November 2024 to February 2025, and was also shortlisted for last year’s Turner Prize. They created a new version of the installation for the Prize exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, which runs until 7 June alongside work by the three other shortlisted artists.
The London-based artist works across photography, film, sculpture, sound and writing, brought together in what they describe as “rude(ness)”—a reference to rudeboy culture as well as a space “to interrupt and be in between”. Their practice often addresses issues of race, gender and class.
“Conversation about representation politics comes up so much in photography and in image-making, but we never move past that,” said Matić in an interview with the Gallery, screened on its website. “We don't talk about what we want to be represented as doing. I want to be represented as being cared for. There are a lot of images of us having violence put on us out there. I want to show a counter-image.”
Born in Peterborough in 1997, Matić is one of the youngest winners in the Prize’s 40-year history. The year of Matić's birth, Richard Billingham won the inaugural edition of the prize with Ray’s a Laugh, an intimate and chaotic portrait of working-class family life in the West Midlands.
Shoair Mavlian, director of The Photographers’ Gallery and chair of the jury, described Matić’s work as “deeply personal, rooted in community and belonging — and [exploring] their power both to heal and bring people together”. Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, said the work “expands what photography is and how we experience it”.
The 2026 shortlist also included Jane Evelyn Atwood, recognised for Too Much Time / Trop de Peines, her long-running study of women’s prisons; Weronika Gęsicka, nominated for Encyclopaedia, a project exploring manipulated images and fabricated knowledge; and Amak Mahmoodian, shortlisted for One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, an immersive meditation on dreams, exile and memory.
