South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa has won the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for a sustained body of work documenting the disappearance of his sister, according to a report published by Ocula. The award, run in partnership with The Photographers' Gallery in London, carries a purse of £30,000 and is widely treated as one of the most consequential mid-career markers in European photography.

What does the prize recognise this year?

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize has been administered since 1996, originally through the Photographers' Gallery and since 2016 with the Foundation's expanded curatorial involvement. Each year's jury reviews photographers who have made a significant contribution to photography in Europe through an exhibition, publication or body of work over the preceding eighteen months. The shortlist of four is shown together at the Gallery before the winner is announced.

Sobekwa's submission extends his ongoing project on his sister Zinhle, who went missing from Johannesburg as a teenager. The work combines domestic interior photographs made in the family home in Thokoza with documentary material from police archives, mortuary visits and the family's own efforts to retrace the girl's last movements.

How does this build on his earlier work?

Sobekwa first drew the Foundation's attention in 2022, when his monograph I Carry Her Photo with Me was shortlisted for the same award. That book, published by Hatje Cantz, centred on 35mm black-and-white prints and torn personal documents as a single intimate register — the image standing in for an absent body. The 2025 submission keeps that restraint but adds colour photography, archival material and recorded family interviews, broadening the project's evidentiary structure without abandoning its quiet register.

Born in 1995 in Katlehong, east of Johannesburg, Sobekwa began photographing his family's circumstances in his early twenties after a brief period of self-taught photojournalism on the East Rand. He joined the Magnum Foundation's Photography and Social Justice programme in 2018 and was made a nominee of Magnum Photos the following year.

What does the win change for the practice?

A prize of this size and pedigree typically opens international exhibition circuits, monographic publication opportunities and acquisition interest from institutional collections. For Sobekwa, who has worked primarily in editorial, small-press and grant-funded contexts, the Deutsche Börse award places the search for Zinhle inside the European institutional conversation around documentary photography's ethics and limits.

The Photographers' Gallery will host the 2025 shortlist exhibition as usual, with the four selected photographers' projects shown together ahead of the winner's announcement. Sobekka's work will then travel to the Foundation's Frankfurt headquarters for a subsequent run.

Where does the work go from here?

Sobekwa has stated publicly that the project will continue until the family has an answer, whatever form that answer takes. The prize removes some of the production pressure that has shaped the project so far, and places the work in front of curators who have not previously engaged with South African long-form documentary practice at this depth.

For practitioners working at the seam between personal archive and photojournalism, the win reopens a question the field has been quietly settling for the past decade: how much institutional visibility a grief-led project can absorb before the grief itself becomes the commodity. Sobekwa's exhibition and publication schedule over the next eighteen months will put that question to the test.