The After Nature. Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 27 has been awarded to Jamilah Sabur and Yuyan Wang, C/O Berlin announced on October 16, with each artist receiving €40,000 alongside a double exhibition and a publication.

Sabur, born in 1987 in Jamaica, works with her grandfather's family history to trace the links between Jamaica and Scotland, exploring malaria control, the sugar industry, colonial medicine and the role of photographic imagery in empire. Her project employs historic photographic printing processes to rework archival and personal material, connecting bodily and botanical histories across the Atlantic.

By reworking images tied to plantation economies and the public-health campaigns that accompanied empire, Sabur asks how photography itself served colonial projects — and how older techniques of image-making can be turned back on that history. Wang, born in 1989 in China, looks instead at the present: a video installation examines the industrial production of artificial plants, objects manufactured from fossil raw materials to simulate nature, staging the encounter between the human, the material and the machine and probing what 'natural' can still mean.

The prize, one of Germany's most substantial photography awards, is presented in partnership with the Crespo Foundation. The two winners' joint exhibition will open at C/O Berlin's Amerika Haus from September 2027 to January 2028 before traveling to the Crespo Open Space in Frankfurt from February 2028.

The prize continues C/O Berlin's long-running commitment to photographic practice that sits between research and art-making. The double exhibition at the Amerika Haus, running from September 2027 to January 2028 before traveling to Frankfurt, will give both projects their most substantial institutional presentation to date — alongside the publication that accompanies the award.