German-born art photographer Wolfgang Tillmans last night won Britain's best-known art award, the Turner Prize.
The 32-year-old artist, whose work has included images of a half-naked man urinating on a chair and of rats running through a city rubbish tip, collected the £20,000 prize at a dinner at the Tate Britain Gallery in London.
Tillmans, who runs a studio in Bethnal Green in London's East End, beat off competition from two painters and an installation artist.
The jury praised the way his photography used different aspects of contemporary culture and managed to create striking images from everyday life.
He first won acclaim in the late 1980s and early 1990s, photographing his friends and peers at raves, festivals and protests, for magazines such as iD.
He once said of his early work: "I put all my love and energy into taking these pictures of people that I thought were beautiful and worth taking pictures of."
His recent work tackles a wide variety of subjects including people, inanimate objects, and landscapes.
The judges said this year's shortlist had been very strong and they expressed their admiration for the work produced by all four finalists.
The only British artist to make the shortlist was Glenn Brown, aged 34, from Hexham, who created controversy when it emerged that one of his pieces bore an uncanny resemblance to the cover of a 1970s science fiction novel.
His huge canvas, The Loves of Shepherds 2000, is an almost identical copy of Tony Roberts' illustration for the cover of the Robert Heinlein novel Double Star.
But Brown, whose pieces reinterpret the work of artists such as Salvador Dali, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, dismissed any accusations of plagiarism. He insisted that he always acknowledged the original artist and had radically altered Roberts's work in terms of scale and colour.
The other artists considered for this year's Turner Prize were Dutch-born painter Michael Raedecker, who was the bookie's favourite to win with his blends of oils and embroidery, and Japanese installation artist Tomoko Takahashi, who filled a room with junk for her exhibition piece.