Anna Higgins has been named the winner of the 2025 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize for her luminous work Two horizons (2025), announced this week at the Museum of Australian Photography in Wheelers Hill. Now in its twentieth year, the Bowness has grown into Australia’s most significant photography award, and Higgins’s win signals just how far its ambitions have travelled.
Her image is arresting yet elusive. At first glance, it resembles a horizon, but its lines bend and blur, the colours bleeding into each other like molten glass. Reds dissolve into mauves and violets. Light splinters across its surface as if the photograph has caught something too bright to hold. Higgins built the work through a painstaking layering of analogue film and digital fragments, folding glimpses of Victoria’s alpine country into something closer to weather than geography. “I wanted to challenge conventions of how the landscape is depicted in photography,” she said, “foregrounding the ephemeral, abstract and painterly qualities of film and light.”
Higgins has long been drawn to the instability of the medium — to the way photographs seem to vanish even as they fix something in place. Two horizons embraces that instability. It resists the impulse to describe and instead releases light to drift, streak and flare. The result is less landscape than atmosphere, hovering between what is real and what is remembered. Judge Anne Zahalka, herself the 2023 Bowness winner, praised Higgins’s work as “a poetic evocation on the Australian landscape, where layers of archival and captured moving images are melded with great sensitivity through her observations of light and atmosphere.” MAPh Director Anouska Phizacklea described Higgins’s approach as “a deft manipulation of light and matter… where a profound understanding of her medium renders the landscape at once painterly and ethereal.”
As this year’s winner, Higgins receives $50,000 and her work will be acquired into MAPh’s collection. Two Honourable Mentions were also awarded, recognising works that, like Higgins’s, expand what photography can hold.
James Tylor was recognised for his series Tapa-arra through the landscape 1, 4, 5 (2024), which traces the ancient network of Kaurna roads that once crossed South Australia. These routes — songlines, trade paths, ceremonial corridors — were followed and later paved over by British and German colonists during the nineteenth century, becoming the highways of today. Tylor photographs these sites as quiet, empty grounds and slices each image down the centre, a gesture both cartographic and elegiac. The split stands as a scar. “Once songlines, now highways,” Zahalka observed, “physically and graphically cut to expose the colonial scars left across the Australian landscape.”
Sarah Rhodes received the other Honourable Mention for Chamber of projection I (2025), a hand-altered gelatin silver print made deep within a limestone cave. Rhodes allowed chemical stains to bloom across the paper like drifting thoughts. Pale tendrils of stalactites and roots lace through the frame. “The cave is a metaphor for the subconscious,” she writes, “a space where inner states can be felt and externalised.” Judge Shaune Lakin called it “one of the most beautiful gelatin silver prints I’ve ever looked at.”
For Lakin, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, the 2025 edition underscored just how far the Bowness has come. “The first few winners I was connected to, from around 2008, tended to be relatively small and singular photographs,” he reflected. “This seems a galaxy away from where the Bowness is now.” The prize, once modest in both scale and reward, now offers a $70,000 total prize pool, has lifted size restrictions, and encourages ambitious works that stretch the medium. “Over the course of its life, the Bowness has come to insist on the primacy of the artist,” Lakin said. “Anna Higgins’s Two horizons is one of the most deeply pleasurable photographic experiences I’ve encountered in a long time… In its formal and critical resolution, it makes a compelling argument for photography’s place in contemporary culture.”
As MAPh Director Phizacklea added: “The Bowness Photography Prize has always been about the artists, providing a platform to celebrate the uniqueness of their practices and for audiences to explore the ways contemporary Australian photographers are using the medium. Each year I discover new ways to read and interpret a photograph, and this year is no exception.”
Higgins’s work has long occupied the shifting edge between photography and painting, reality and dream. After graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts, she developed a practice rooted in experimentation with analogue film — manipulating exposures, double-printing, projecting moving images back onto still film stock, and layering light leaks as if they were brushstrokes. Over the past decade, her practice has evolved into a slow and meticulous exploration of perception itself. She has often said her images are built not to depict but to “suspend” moments, like a breath caught in light. This devotion to process gives her work its rare density: each image feels distilled rather than captured, as if formed by time as much as by hand.
Her win also signals a quiet but profound shift within Australian photography. For much of the past two decades, the country’s photographic scene has oscillated between documentary realism and conceptual photomedia. In recent years, however, a more poetic and process-driven sensibility has begun to emerge — one that privileges atmosphere, material experimentation and memory over clear-cut narratives. Higgins’s work embodies this movement without belonging wholly to any school. She dissolves the boundary between record and reverie, rejecting the single decisive moment in favour of layered durations. Her images carry faint echoes of Romantic landscape traditions yet resist any sense of conquest or clarity. That the Bowness has recognised such work marks a decisive embrace of the medium’s more speculative and lyrical possibilities.
At twenty, the Bowness feels newly assured. Once a contest of striking images, it now champions photographs that linger rather than shout — works shaped by time, relation and care. Higgins’s Two horizons embodies that shift. It does not claim to capture the world; it lets the world dissolve into light, holding only what can never be fully held.
