A 29-Year-Old Just Won Britain's Biggest Photography Prize
Rene Matić wins the Deutsche Börse · Aperture publishes Ishiuchi Miyako and Koudelka · Iturbide's Nuestra Señora, and what's on view from around the world of photography
THE FRAME
Britain’s Longest-Running Photography Prize Catches Up with the Work
The 2026 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize was awarded Thursday evening at The Photographers’ Gallery in London to Rene Matić, the 29-year-old Peterborough-born artist who has become, in the space of three years, one of the most consequential voices in British photography. The £30,000 prize — Britain’s longest-running annual photography honor — was given for AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, Matić’s solo exhibition at CCA Berlin which ran from November 2024 through February 2025.
The shortlist read as the foundation’s strongest in a decade: Jane Evelyn Atwood for the bilingual reprint of Too Much Time / Trop de Peines; Weronika Gęsicka for Encyclopaedia, published by BLOW UP PRESS; and Amak Mahmoodian for One Hundred and Twenty Minutes at the Bristol Photo Festival. Each shortlisted artist receives £5,000.
Matić’s win is significant on multiple counts. They are among the youngest winners in the prize’s 40-year history and the first British recipient in more than a decade. Their practice — diaristic photographs of friends and chosen family, presented alongside sound, film, and found objects — sits at the intersection of subculture, class, and queered domesticity, exactly the territory the British photography establishment has historically circled without entering. As The Art Newspaper noted in its coverage recently, the choice signals a generational and political shift in what the foundation, and by extension the gallery, takes seriously.
WHY IT MATTERS
When a prize this canonical lands on an artist this young, working on these subjects, it's not just a prize — it's a course correction. The Deutsche Börse's shortlist this year, and the Sony World Photography Awards' choice of Citlali Fabián in April, suggest the institutional center of photography is finally catching up to the work that has been quietly redefining the field for half a decade.
THE PHOTOGRAPH
Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas —
Graciela Iturbide, 1979
In 1979, Graciela Iturbide began what would become a seven-year documentary engagement with the Zapotec women of Juchitán de Zaragoza, a small town in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca where matriarchal social structures had endured against the gendered grain of broader Mexican society. The image that emerged from that first year — a portrait of a market vendor named Zobeida Díaz, head crowned with live iguanas she had been selling — would, within a decade, become one of the defining photographs of twentieth-century Mexican art. It is now held in the collections of SFMOMA, the International Center of Photography, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and has been reproduced as a statue in Juchitán itself, where the original subject is still remembered by name.
Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas belongs to a body of work — Juchitán de las Mujeres, 1979–86 — that earned Iturbide the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund grant in 1987 and, eventually, the Hasselblad Award in 2008. It is also a useful counterpoint to this week’s other major photography news. The Sony Photographer of the Year for 2026, announced last month, is Citlali Fabián, an artist from the Yalalteca Indigenous community in Oaxaca whose series Bilha, Stories of my Sisters takes up the documentation of Indigenous Mexican women’s lives that Iturbide began nearly half a century ago. The line from Juchitán to Bilha is direct, and the institutional photography world has finally caught up with what Iturbide saw first.
ON VIEW
New This Week
Hujar:Contact
The Morgan Library
New York · Opens Friday, May 22, 2026 – through October 25
The Morgan’s Hujar exhibition opens this Friday, pairing contact sheets with finished prints across the photographer’s career — from the Portraits in Life and Death (1976) series to the East Village photographs that defined a downtown generation. Accompanies the MACK / Morgan Library publication Hujar:Contact by Joel Smith.
Photoville 2026
Photoville
Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York · Through June
The free open-air photography festival’s opening weekend wrapped Saturday at Brooklyn Bridge Park; the broader festival continues through June. This year’s banner exhibition from the International Center of Photography, ICE in Communities, addresses the experience of immigration enforcement under the current federal administration.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage
Moderna Museet, Malmö
May 2 – September 27, 2026
The exhibition concentrates on Turbeville’s personal experiments in photo-collage — the cutting, taping, and reassembly that gave her fashion editorials their distinctive air of unreality. A long-overdue Scandinavian survey of work that has been more cited than seen.
THIS WEEK
Talks, openings, fairs, and closings — day by day, May 17 through May 24.
Monday, May 18
Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles — final day at the Art Institute of Chicago
Friday, May 22
Hujar:Contact — opening day at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
Friday, May 22 – Sunday, May 24
The Phair 2026 at Turin · Three-day photography fair with equal-space gallery format and a three-day talks programme
Saturday, May 24
Sophie Calle: Overshare — final day at OCMA, Costa Mesa
Martin Parr: Global Warning — final day at Jeu de Paume, Paris
Johny Pitts: Black Bricolage — final day at MEP, Paris
Dana Lixenberg: American Images — final day at MEP, Paris
FAIR & FESTIVAL WATCH
Opening This Month
Bieler Fototage 2026 in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (through May 31), built around the theme of vulnerability as shared social condition
Fotofestival Lenzburg in Lenzburg and Aarau, Switzerland (through June 7), themed Forever Happy
Les Boutographies 2026 in Montpellier (through May 31), the European emerging-talent festiva
The Phair 2026 in Turin (May 22–24)
Sur FotoLibros 2026 in Buenos Aires (May 28–31), the international photobook gathering
PHotoESPAÑA 2026 in Madrid, opening this week and running through September 13.
OFF THE PRESS
New & Noteworthy
Josef Koudelka: Diaries
Aperture
May 2026 · Hardcover
For half a century, the Czech Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka has built a body of work — Gypsies (1975), Exiles(1988), the panoramic landscapes of Chaos (1999) — that operates at the scale of nations and centuries. Diaries offers something rarer: the artist’s own workbook. Diary-page facsimiles, contact-sheet photographs, and self-portraits trace the daily, private practice that produced those public masterworks. Particularly rewarding for readers who have lived with Koudelka’s prints for years and are now invited to see the thinking behind them.
LAMF: Three Days in Berlin, 1987 by John Gossage
Magic Hour Press
May 2026 · 80 pages · 44 tritone images with silkscreen UV varnish
A historical artifact of the highest production caliber. In November 1987 — two years before the Wall came down — the American photographer John Gossage spent three days in West Berlin and made the photographs that, almost forty years later, MACK now presents as a deluxe tritone edition. Gossage’s The Pond (1985) is widely regarded as one of the most influential American photobooks of its decade; LAMF extends the same disciplined attention to the surface of late-Cold-War Berlin — its graffiti, its grey buildings, its specific quality of pre-collapse stillness.
Traces by Ishiuchi Miyako
Aperture
May 2026 · Hardcover
The first comprehensive English-language survey of one of Japan’s most important contemporary photographers, Tracesgathers more than four decades of Ishiuchi Miyako’s work — from the gritty, dye-stained portraits of Yokosuka that opened her career in the late 1970s to the cellular intimacy of Mother’s (the photographs of her mother’s clothes and possessions, made after her mother’s death) and the ひろしま/hiroshima series, in which the surviving garments of atomic-bomb victims are presented with an attention reserved, in another tradition, for relics. Ishiuchi (b. 1947) won the Hasselblad Award in 2014; this volume positions her work, finally, for the English-language readership it has long deserved.
IN THE WEEKS AHEAD
Opening, Closing and Ongoing Exhibitions from Around the World
OPENING SOON
Buenos Aires
Sur FotoLibros 2026 — May 28–31 (photobook festival)
Malmö
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage — Moderna Museet Malmö · Opens May 2 (fashion / fine art)
New York
Hujar:Contact — The Morgan Library & Museum · Opens May 22
Turin
The Phair 2026 — May 22–24 (fair)
CLOSING SOON
Chicago
Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles — Art Institute of Chicago · Closes May 18 (documentary)
Costa Mesa
Sophie Calle: Overshare — OCMA · Closes May 24 (fine art)
London
Catherine Opie: To Be Seen — National Portrait Gallery · Closes May 31 (fine art)
Paris
Martin Parr: Global Warning — Jeu de Paume · Closes May 24 (documentary)
Johny Pitts: Black Bricolage — Maison Européenne de la Photographie · Closes May 24 (documentary)
Dana Lixenberg: American Images — Maison Européenne de la Photographie · Closes May 24 (documentary)
Turin
Community. Photography and Belonging — Kunstpalast · Closes May 25
ONGOING
Amsterdam
World Press Photo 2026 — De Nieuwe Kerk · Through Sep 27 (photojournalism)
Antwerp
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now — FOMU Antwerp · Through Jun 1 (fine art)
Berlin
Phillip Toledano: Never Seen The Light — Fotografiska Berlin
Anna Ehrenstein: In The Language of the Soil — Fotografiska Berlin · Through Jun 12
Brooklyn / New York
Photoville 2026 — Brooklyn Bridge Park · Through June (festival)
Houston
FotoFest Biennial 2026: Global Visions — Sawyer Yards · Through Sep 10
Innsbruck
Above The River and Under the Sky — Maciej Markowicz — Inn Situ · Through Jul 18 (camera obscura)
London
Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2026 — Somerset House
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026 — The Photographers’ Gallery
John Riddy: Winter Landscape — Frith Street Gallery · Through Jun 25
Los Angeles
Photography and the Black Arts Movement — Getty Center · Through Jun 14 (historical)
Paris
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well — Grand Palais · Through Jun 21 (documentary)
Lee Miller: Dressed for War — Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris · Through Jun 14 (fashion / war)
Kazuo Kitai: In Praise of the Everyday — Maison de la culture du Japon · Through Jul 25 (documentary)
Rome
Francesca Woodman — Gagosian Rome · Through Jul 31 (fine art)
The Hague
Mixedness Is My Mythology — Farren van Wyk — Fotomuseum Den Haag · Through Aug 23 (documentary)
Tucson
Callahan, Gowin and Sommer — Etherton Gallery · Through Jul 11 (historical)
ONE QUESTION
The Deutsche Börse went to Rene Matić, a chronicler of British working-class life. The Sony Photographer of the Year went to Citlali Fabián, an Indigenous Mexican photographer. Both prizes now consistently honor photographers from positions traditionally outside the institutional center. Has the international photography prize landscape finally caught up with the work that matters — or are these awards still two beats behind the artists they’re supposed to recognize?
Reply with your view. The most interesting responses appear in next week’s issue.
DID YOU KNOW?
Joel Meyerowitz, named this year's Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography honoree, was one of a small group of American photographers who insisted on color in the early 1960s — at a moment when the Museum of Modern Art treated color as a vulgarity reserved for advertising. His 1962 New York street photographs predate William Eggleston's landmark MoMA show Photographs by William Eggleston by fourteen years. The recognition the photography establishment finally gave Eggleston in 1976 was something Meyerowitz had been quietly practicing since the Kennedy administration.
ON THIS DAY
May 18, 1980 — Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington State at 8:32 a.m. local time. Among those killed in the lateral blast is Robert Landsburg, a 48-year-old volcano photographer who, recognizing he could not outrun the pyroclastic flow, used his last seconds to rewind the film in his camera, place it in his backpack, and lie down on top of the backpack to shield it with his body. The film was recovered seventeen days later and the photographs published in National Geographic the following year. The David Powell UPI image of the eruption itself, made the same morning from a chartered plane, became one of the defining photojournalistic images of the 1980s.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY
To advertise an exhibition, book, fair, or open call to photography collectors, curators, and gallerists worldwide, email internationalphotographynews@gmail.com