Spring 2025 Season at the Photographers’ Gallery

From carefully staged interventions to deeply personal documentary explorations, the four artists shortlisted for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize roam distinct yet interconnected realms of the medium, with the winner set to be announced on 15^th May 2025.

Cristina De Middel’s Journey to the Centre reimagines the treacherous Central American migration route by blurring documentary photography with staged tableaux that evoke Jules Verne’s sense of adventure. In Una Piedra en el Camino (2021), a solitary elderly woman sits with her back to the camera in a tranquil body of water, reframing the crisis-laden imagery often associated with migration as a mythical odyssey. Her surreal, contemplative approach reframes migration not as a linear event but as a kaleidoscopic space where fact and fiction merge, revealing its fluid, subjective nature.

Rahim Fortune’s Hardtack is embedded in the landscapes and cultural fabric of the American South, where histories of Black migration, labour and survival are written into the land itself. His portraits of young bull riders, praise dancers and rodeo queens evoke a sense of continuity, bridging past and present through an acute sensitivity to gesture and place. The titular unleavened bread – a durable, unyielding bread of Civil War rations – serves as a powerful metaphor for endurance, carrying with it the weight of history and the quiet tenacity of those who navigate its lingering echoes.

Tarrah Krajnak’s Shadowings: A Catalogue of Attitudes for Estranged Daughters encompasses two decades of her work. While her oeuvre shows an intriguing conceptual foundation, certain pieces, particularly the diptychs from Rock, Paper Sun (2023), fall short of the expected innovation. These works, born from Krajnak’s use of the Surrealist method of automatic writing, feel formulaic. The black-and-white close-ups of Krajnak holding rocks, accompanied by handwritten text, lean too heavily on a long-established practice and, in doing so, fail to realise the deeper, more radical potential that Surrealism offers both aesthetically and conceptually.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s I Carry Her Photo with Me is the most intimate of the four, offering a poignant exploration of grief and the unresolved disappearance of his sister, Ziyanda. Her presence lingers throughout the series, from the titular family portrait, where her face is sharply redacted, to pictures of her friends, each accompanied by Sobekwa’s raw, handwritten afterthoughts. His work transcends personal tragedy, connecting to the broader narrative of unresolved disappearances in South Africa’s history. Rather than merely documenting, his photographs capture fragments of a story continually reshaped through memory and image.

If the finalists’ works represent photography’s present, the other two exhibitions create a compelling dialogue between the medium’s past and its speculative future.

Nothing Lasts Forever is a poignant retrospective of Peter Mitchell, one of the UK’s pioneering and most influential colour photographers. Over four decades, Mitchell has chronicled the changing landscape of Leeds, capturing its people and places with a blend of historical accuracy and poetic storytelling. Two street-style portraits of scarecrows are featured alongside an early quote from Mitchell, who describes them as “friends”. Made of straw and dressed in human attire, these figures are both products of the human condition and symbols of transience – neither fully mortal nor immortal. Through these snapshots, he demonstrates photography’s unique ability to capture and preserve ephemeral moments that would otherwise be lost to time.

Meanwhile, I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine, by the creative research collective Planetary Portals, digs into the colonial foundations of generative artificial intelligence. Presented in a darkroom-like setting, the exhibition relies too heavily on its suggested digital guide to fully conceptualise its themes, making it feel like less of a standalone experience. Yet, at its starkest moments, the short film exposes how technology can distort and reshape historical narratives. In Pastoral Landscape, a red dot and annotation on an archival still from the Bodleian Library isolate a Black man from the natural world – a deliberate visual rupture that exposes the colonial gaze of the original photograph that sought to cast him invisible.

Collectively, the Photographers’ Gallery’s spring season explores the form’s transformative potential, with each image testifying to photography’s limitless possibilities to reframe, reveal and reflect.

Christina Yang
Photos: Una Piedra en el Camino from the series Journey to the Center, 2021. © Cristina De Middel / Magnum Photos

Spring 2025 Season is at the Photographer’s Gallery from 7^th March until 15^th June 2025. For further information or to book visit the exhibition’s website here.