Lindokuhle Sobekwa has won the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, one of the most coveted awards in the medium, worth £30,000 to the winner.

The announcement names the South African photographer as this year's laureate, capping a rise that has been unusually fast and unusually well deserved in equal measure. Sobekwa was born in 1995 in Katlehong, a township east of Johannesburg, and came to international attention through work rooted in that territory — work that has never once mistaken grit for a style.

The prize, founded in 1996 and administered by The Photographers' Gallery in London in partnership with the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, recognises a living artist of any nationality who has made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe over the previous year. The win places Sobekwa in the company of previous laureates including Susan Meiselas, Juergen Teller and, more recently, a run of laureates chosen for bodies of work rather than single images. That suits him. Sobekwa builds series the way novelists build chapters.

Why Sobekwa?

His best-known projects have consistently circled the same themes: family, disappearance, drugs, and the stubborn dignity of township life. Nyaope, his early study of users of the eponymous street drug, avoided both moralising and voyeurism — a balance few photographers manage when the subject is addiction. Later work, including the handmade-book project I Carry Her Photo With Me, turned to his sister Zanele, who vanished from the family in 2002, and to photography's own failures: what a picture cannot recover.

He joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2018, at 23, and has since moved through the agency's ranks while maintaining an archive-first, community-close practice. His photographs are typically black and white, tightly sequenced, and suspicious of spectacle. The craft is quiet on purpose.

What the win changes

Beyond the £30,000 cheque — roughly a decade of average annual income in the township where he grew up — the prize brings institutional weight. Shortlisted artists traditionally show at The Photographers' Gallery in London, and winners see their work enter the Deutsche Börse Art Collection, one of the world's largest corporate holdings of contemporary photography, numbering some 3,000-plus works spanning from the mid-20th century onward.

For a photographer whose subjects rarely appear in European institutional frames, that shift matters. It also continues a deliberate broadening of the prize's geography; Sobekwa's win follows years in which the award has gone beyond Europe and North America's usual rosters.

The verdict

The judges have, in effect, argued that the most significant photography in Europe last year was made by a South African looking homeward. That's a defensible claim. Sobekwa's work earns attention without pleading for it.

Expect the win to accelerate an already busy schedule: exhibitions, publications, and the ongoing question of Zanele's story, which he has said remains unfinished. Where the work goes next — toward resolution or deeper into the gap — is now the most watchable question in the prize's orbit.