Lindokuhle Sobekwa has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2025, the announcement that closes this year's edition of one of photography's most closely watched awards. The South African photographer joins a shortlist-beating lineage of winners that stretches back to the prize's founding in 1996, when it was established by The Photographers' Gallery in London.

Sobekwa emerged from Katlehong, a township east of Johannesburg, and built his practice through documentary series rooted in South African life. His best-known work, "I carry Her photo with Me" (2017), began as a search for his sister Ziyanda, who disappeared when he was seven and died young; the series pairs a hole-punched family portrait with images of absence, memory and return. That project, published as a book by Mack in 2024 and first developed through the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, propelled him into the international exhibition circuit.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize carries a £30,000 award and is administered by The Photographers' Gallery, with the ceremony traditionally held at the London venue. Each year a jury of curators, editors and critics selects four finalists from nominations gathered across the international photography community, then names one winner whose work has significantly advanced the medium over the past year.

What does the win change for practitioners?

For working photographers, the signal matters as much as the money. Sobekwa's win confirms a shift the prize has tracked for a decade: the centre of gravity in documentary photography has moved toward projects made inside communities, over long durations, rather than assignments parachuted in from outside. His photographs are made with his subjects, not merely of them.

The result also strengthens the pathway that produced him. The Market Photo Workshop, founded by David Goldblatt in 1989, has now shaped two generations of South African image-makers, and Sobekwa — who also joined the Magnum Photos cooperative as a nominee in 2018 and became a full member in 2022 — demonstrates that institution-building at home can carry a career to the largest stages abroad.

Why this prize carries institutional weight

The Deutsche Börse Foundation has backed the award since 2005, and the prize consistently rewards bodies of work rather than single images. Recent winners have included projects spanning portraiture, documentary and archival reworking, and the associated exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery has become a fixture of the London photography calendar each summer.

Winning typically triggers a cascade: acquisitions by major collections, expanded book editions and new commissions follow within months. For Sobekwa, whose practice already spans South Africa and work made abroad, the prize arrives as his audience broadens beyond the documentary world into fine-art institutions.

Where Sobekwa's work goes from here

The announcement positions Sobekwa at the head of a generation redefining what documentary photography can claim and confess at once. With the prize's exhibition platform, the Mack publication of "I carry Her photo with Me" still in circulation and new projects in development, his next bodies of work will command attention across European and South African institutions alike.