A Defining Moment for Contemporary British Image-Making: Rene Matić Wins the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize

In a ceremony held at The Photographers’ Gallery in London on May 14, 2025, the art world witnessed a significant shift in the landscape of contemporary photography. Rene Matić, a London-based multidisciplinary artist, was announced as the winner of the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. This prestigious accolade, often cited as the most significant award in the photographic medium within Europe, recognizes Matić for their evocative solo exhibition, “AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH,” originally staged at CCA Berlin.

Matić’s victory marks a historical milestone: they are the first British artist to claim the prize in over a decade. Beyond the geographical significance, the win underscores a growing institutional embrace of work that transcends traditional documentary photography to explore the intersections of race, gender, subculture, and personal memory. At just 28 years old, Matić’s ascent has been meteoric, as they were also recently shortlisted for the 2025 Turner Prize, making them the second-youngest nominee in that competition’s history.

Main Facts: The Triumph of "AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH"

The jury’s decision to award Rene Matić the top honor centers on the profound narrative depth of “AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH,” which ran at CCA Berlin from November 8, 2024, to February 15, 2025. The exhibition serves as a sophisticated evolution of Matić’s previous work, specifically their 2022 show “Born British Die British” at Vitrine Gallery.

Matić’s practice is characterized by a "cross-media" approach. While photography remains the anchor, their work seamlessly incorporates film, sculpture, installation, and text. The winning exhibition focuses heavily on the artist’s complex relationship with their father, using this domestic lens to interrogate broader themes of British identity, nationalism, and the aesthetic codes of working-class subcultures—most notably the skinhead movement and Northern Soul.

By blending the archival with the personal, Matić challenges the viewer to look past the surface of the "truth" presented in a photograph. Their work asks how images can simultaneously act as a "blessing and a burden," capturing the intimacy of familial bonds while acknowledging the heavy socio-political histories those bonds carry. The £30,000 prize money is intended to support the continuation of this rigorous inquiry, providing the artist with the resources to expand their interdisciplinary reach.

Chronology: From Berlin to London and Beyond

The trajectory of Matić’s winning project reflects a carefully curated international journey that highlights the global nature of the contemporary art market.

1. November 2024 – February 2025: “AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH” premieres at CCA Berlin. This was Matić’s first solo exhibition in Germany and served as the primary basis for their Deutsche Börse nomination. The exhibition was praised for its site-specific resonance, given Berlin’s own complex history with subculture and national identity.
2. Early 2025: Matić is named to the shortlist of four artists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, alongside Amak Mahmoodian, Jane Evelyn Atwood, and Weronika Gęsicka.
3. March 6 – June 7, 2025: The Photographers’ Gallery in London hosts the annual exhibition of the four shortlisted artists. This period allowed the British public and the jury to engage with the physical installations of the work in a unified space.
4. May 14, 2025: During a live ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery, Rene Matić is officially declared the winner.
5. September 3, 2026 – January 17, 2027: Following the London show, the works of the winner and the finalists will travel to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation’s headquarters in Eschborn, Frankfurt am Main. This touring aspect ensures that the discourse generated by the prize continues to engage audiences across the European continent.

This timeline also runs parallel to Matić’s recognition by the Tate, as their Turner Prize nomination occurred during the same cycle, cementing 2025 as a "watershed year" for the artist’s career.

Supporting Data: A Diverse Shortlist and the Evolution of the Prize

While Matić took the top prize, the 2025 shortlist was notable for its breadth and its willingness to engage with the technological frontiers of the medium. Each of the three remaining finalists received £5,000, acknowledging their significant contributions to the field.

• Weronika Gęsicka (Poland): Perhaps the most debated nominee, Gęsicka became the first artist in the prize’s history to be shortlisted for a body of work produced with the assistance of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Her project interrogated the reliability of memory and the "uncanny valley" of digital recreation, sparking a wider industry conversation about the definition of "photography" in the age of neural networks.
• Amak Mahmoodian (Iran): Mahmoodian’s work focused on the Persian archival tradition, blending personal history with the collective trauma of displacement. Her inclusion highlighted the prize’s commitment to exploring how photography functions as a tool for political and cultural preservation in the Global South.
• Jane Evelyn Atwood (USA): Representing the "veteran" voice of the group, Atwood’s decades-long career in humanist documentary photography—covering everything from the lives of incarcerated women to the victims of landmines—provided a stark, classical contrast to the more experimental approaches of her younger peers.

The selection of these four artists by the jury—which included prominent curators and critics—demonstrates a strategic effort to balance legacy documentary practices (Atwood) with the avant-garde (Gęsicka) and the sociopolitically urgent (Matić and Mahmoodian).

Official Responses: Critical Acclaim and Institutional Vision

The reception of Matić’s win has been overwhelmingly positive, with critics pointing to the artist’s ability to handle sensitive topics with both poetic grace and intellectual rigor.

In an interview with The British Journal of Photography, Matić articulated the philosophy behind their winning show: "I am interested in the line between blessing and burden. How to bring things to light and dark all at once." This sentiment—the idea that an image is never just one thing—resonated deeply with the judging panel.

Anne-Marie Beckmann, Director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, noted that the prize continues to serve as a barometer for the most pressing issues in society. In official statements, the Foundation emphasized that Matić’s work does not merely "document" identity but "interrogates the very structures" that define it. Shoair Mavlian, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, lauded Matić’s victory as a testament to the vibrancy of the UK’s current artistic landscape, noting that the artist’s voice is essential for understanding the complexities of "post-Brexit" Britishness.

Jurors also commented on the "visceral" nature of the exhibition at CCA Berlin, noting that Matić’s use of sound and physical objects (such as sculptures that echo skinhead fashion) created an immersive experience that traditional framed photography often lacks.

Implications: The Future of Photography and the British Identity

The victory of Rene Matić carries several long-term implications for the art world and the medium of photography at large.

1. The "British Dry Spell" Ends

Matić is the first British artist to win since 2014, ending a decade-long period where the prize largely favored international practitioners from mainland Europe, Africa, and Asia. This win signals a resurgence of interest in British social documentary, albeit one that is significantly more diverse and experimental than the "Kitchen Sink" realism of previous generations. It suggests that the "British story" is once again being seen as a vital, globally relevant narrative.

2. The Multi-Hyphenate Artist as the New Standard

Matić’s win reinforces a shift in how "photographers" are defined. The fact that a prize specifically for photography was won by an artist who uses sculpture and film as much as a camera suggests that the medium’s boundaries have permanently dissolved. For future nominees, the "photographic" may refer more to a way of seeing or a conceptual framework than to the specific act of using a lens.

3. The AI Debate Enters the Mainstream

While Gęsicka did not win, her nomination remains a historic turning point. By placing AI-assisted work on the same shortlist as Jane Evelyn Atwood’s traditional film photography, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation has effectively "legitimized" AI as a tool within the fine art photography canon. This will likely lead to more AI-integrated submissions in coming years, forcing institutions to grapple with issues of authorship and the "truth" of the image.

4. Identity as a Fluid Archive

Finally, Matić’s work moves the conversation around "identity politics" into a more nuanced space. By focusing on the "burden" of history alongside the "blessing" of intimacy, Matić avoids the pitfalls of didactic art. Their work suggests that identity is not a fixed point to be captured, but a fluid, often contradictory archive that must be constantly re-examined.

As Rene Matić prepares for the upcoming Turner Prize announcement and the subsequent tour of their winning work to Frankfurt, their victory stands as a powerful reminder of art’s ability to bridge the gap between the personal and the political. In the hands of Matić, the camera is not just a tool for observation, but a medium for radical empathy and historical reckoning.