The Guardian has published its review of this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition, and the verdict lands on the side of engagement: a shortlist spanning Black cowboys, what the paper's critic calls "bonkers rock-huggers," and one project described as a story of shocking loss.

The review addresses the annual prize exhibition as a whole rather than singling out a single winner. That matters. The Deutsche Börse Prize, one of the most closely watched awards in the photographic calendar, typically honors a living artist for a specific body of work shown or published in the preceding year, and the London exhibition that accompanies the shortlist has become a fixture of the photographic season.

What does the show actually deliver?

According to the Guardian's account, three distinct threads run through the exhibition.

• Black cowboys. A body of work centered on Black riders and the equestrian traditions of the American West — subject matter that continues a broader institutional correction of a cowboy imagery canon dominated, for more than a century, by whitewashed Hollywood mythmaking.
• "Bonkers rock-huggers." The critic's own phrasing, and it signals affection rather than dismissal: work eccentric enough in method or subject — figures embracing stone, geology treated with devotional intensity — to earn the adjective without losing the reviewer's respect.
• A story of shocking loss. The third project, in the paper's reading, carries the emotional weight of the shortlist. The Guardian frames it as the exhibition's most affecting contribution, a narrative of bereavement or disappearance rendered through photography.

The tone of the review is measured but favorable. The critic finds the exhibition worth the visit, even while the deliberately loose, colloquial language of the headline — "bonkers" is not a word deployed at art one disdains — tells readers this is a show with humor as well as gravity in it.

Why the prize still counts

The Deutsche Börse Prize occupies a particular position in the photography world. It rewards a completed project — an exhibition or publication — rather than promise, which pushes the shortlist toward artists with substantial institutional footprints. A Guardian review at exhibition time functions as an early temperature check ahead of the winner's announcement.

The presence of a Black cowboy series on the shortlist is consistent with a wider institutional shift. Museums and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have spent the past decade recovering Black contributions to the mythology of the American West, a history long cropped out of the frame. That a prize exhibition now platforms such work signals how far that correction has traveled from specialist archives into mainstream curatorial practice.

The "rock-hugger" work, by contrast, suggests the shortlist's experimental wing. Photography that turns on physical encounter — the body pressed against geological time — sits within a lineage of land-art documentation and performance-based camera work. The Guardian's amused phrasing shouldn't obscure the point: this is process-driven practice, and the critic evidently found it coherent enough to take seriously.

The story of loss

The third project anchors the review's strongest language. A "story of shocking loss" is not casual copy. It positions that body of work as the emotional center of the exhibition, and it is the thread most likely to linger with visitors — and, arguably, with the jury.

Prize juries do not always reward the most affecting work. They reward the project that best fits the prize's definition of achievement: a complete, exhibited or published body of work that has advanced the field. A narrative of loss, handled with formal control, can do exactly that.

What comes next

The shortlist exhibition remains on view ahead of the jury's decision, and the Guardian's review — favorable on the whole, skeptical of nothing here — suggests a show worth seeing in person rather than judging through reproduction. Readers can expect the winner announcement to follow the exhibition run, with the usual questions about which of the three registers the jury backs: the historical correction, the eccentric experiment, or the elegy.