Aesthetica Magazine – Identity and Belonging

What does it mean to belong? How does the place we grow up shape our identity? How do we honour intergenerational traditions and family memories? The shortlisted photographers for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize bring these questions to the fore, unflinchingly scrutinising the traditions of lens-based work and asking questions about who or what is documented. They bring together documentary photography, constructed images, self-portraiture, performance and family archives to produce powerful works that are not to be missed. 

Cristina De Middel: Journey to the Center

The migration route across Mexico begins in Tapachula, on the country’s southern border with Guatemala, and ends in Felicity, a small town in California which officially claims the absurd title “Centre of the World.” The border fence is visible from there, adding to the dystopic disappointment of the journey, where the final destination is no more than a roadside tourist attraction. Cristina De Middel borrows from the Jules Verne book Journey to the Centre of the Earth to present this passage as heroic and daring, rather than a desperate escape. She combines documentary photography with constructed images and archival material and uses multi-layered narratives to reflect the complexity of modern human migration, countering how it is often simplistically portrayed in the media and official report.

Rahim Fortune: Hardtack  

Hardtack is an unleavened bread made with flour, water and salt that was typical of the southern states of America during the Civil War era. Due to its extremely long shelf life, it has long been associated with survivalism and land migration. Rahim Fortune draws on this as a metaphor for the enduring nature of Black culture and traditions. His striking portraits document coming-of-age traditions – young bull-riders, praise dancers and pageant queens – and his subjects gracefully embrace these community rituals. Fortune pays tribute to the rigour, discipline and creative flair of these cultural performances, alongside the intergenerational conversation between young people and elders handing down these traditions. His work is an expression of love to the region which nurtured him personally and creatively.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa: I carry Her photo with Me 

Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s deeply personal project began when he found a family portrait with his older sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. It remains the only photograph he has of her. One day when the siblings were seven and thirteen, she chased him and he was hit be a car and badly injured. She disappeared hours later, only returning a decade later, ill. By this time, Sobekwa had become a photographer. He tried to take her portrait but stopped when she reacted angrily. Ziyanda died soon after. I carry Her photo with Me combines photographs, handwritten notes and family snapshots. Through this scrapbook-like publication Sobekwa explores the memory of his sister and the wider implications of such disappearances – a common and troubling part of South Africa’s history.

Tarrah Krajnak: Shadowings: A Catalogue of Attitudes for Estranged Daughters

The Peruvian-American artist bends time and blurs the lines between staged self-portraiture and performance, self and other, fact and fiction. She uses the camera as a research tool, analysing and challenging the history of the canon. In a recent feature by British Journal of Photography, her work was described as “transport[ing] its viewer through a labyrinthine search for origins – a journey which she known, from the outsit, impossible.” Krajank considers the limitations of the documentary form, asking questions of how one can properly capture places that have been neglected. “How can you document histories that have been erased? How do you photograph those histories at the margins? It’s not really about this idea of visibility; it’s about resuscitating or trying to find other ways to document.”

The 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize shortlisted artists will be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery from 7 March -15 June 2025.

Words: Emma Jacob