Rene Matić has been introduced as the primary British winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in additional than a decade, amassing £30,000 for AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, an exhibition utilising images, set up and sound to discover notions of identification and belonging in up to date society.
The announcement was made at The Photographers’ Gallery at a night ceremony on Thursday, 14 May, recognising the work that the worldwide jury thought of essentially the most important contribution to up to date images in Europe over the previous 12 months. Matić was nominated for his or her exhibition on the Center for Contemporary Arts Berlin (CCA Berlin), which ran from November 2024 to February 2025, and was additionally shortlisted for final 12 months’s Turner Prize. They created a brand new model of the set up for the Prize exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, which runs till 7 June alongside work by the three different shortlisted artists.
The London-based artist works throughout images, movie, sculpture, sound and writing, introduced collectively in what they describe as “rude(ness)”—a reference to rudeboy tradition in addition to an area “to interrupt and be in between”. Their apply typically addresses problems with race, gender and sophistication.
“Conversation about representation politics comes up so much in photography and in image-making, but we never move past that,” mentioned 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 among the youngest winners within the Prize’s 40-year historical past. The 12 months of Matić’s beginning, Richard Billingham gained the inaugural version of the prize with Ray’s a Laugh, an intimate and chaotic portrait of working-class household life within 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, mentioned the work “expands what photography is and how we experience it”.
The 2026 shortlist additionally included Jane Evelyn Atwood, recognised for Too Much Time / Trop de Peines, her long-running research of girls’s prisons; Weronika Gęsicka, nominated for Encyclopaedia, a challenge exploring manipulated pictures and fabricated information; and Amak Mahmoodian, shortlisted for One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, an immersive meditation on desires, exile and reminiscence.