The Museum of Australian Photography does not arrive all at once.
It keeps to itself among the trees, a low run of pale concrete and glass with a sharp-angled tower, quiet enough to seem almost provisional against the Victorian sky. A single vertical banner at the entrance signals the twentieth William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, its typography upright and matter-of-fact. Inside, the brightness falls away. Sound softens.
Just beyond the doors, a freestanding wall halts you like an intake of breath. On one face, fifty names rise in crisp white letters — Hoda Afshar, Naomi Hobson, Odette England, Morganna Magee, Justine Varga, Gerwyn Davies, Zoë Croggon, Riste Andrievski, Guy Grabowsky, Sarah Rhodes, Shea Kirk, Kai Wasikowski, Sonia Payes, Tamara Dean, Isabella Capezio, Kent Morris, among others — not a list so much as a pulse. On the reverse, twenty years of prizewinners descend in a neat line: Robert Fielding (2024), Anne Zahalka (2023), Amos Gebhardt (2022), Lillian O’Neil (2021), Christian Thompson (2020), Katrin Koenning (2019), Hoda Afshar (2018), Polixeni Papapetrou (2017), Valerie Sparks (2016), Joseph McGlennon (2015), Petrina Hicks (2014), Pat Brassington (2013), Jesse Marlow (2012), Jacky Redgate (2011), Lee Grant (2010), Paul Knight (2009), Nat Thomas & Concettina Inserra (2008), Ray Cook (2007) and Kathy Mackey (2006).
The wall works less as signage than as a threshold. It does not welcome so much as pause you, as if to make clear that what follows will not be a parade of images but a proposition: that Australian photography, at twenty years of Bowness, is shifting from spectacle toward process — from trophy images toward ethical experiments in time, relation, and care.
This year’s iteration arrives on a larger scale. Over the past two decades, more than 12,000 artists have submitted to the prize, with over 1,000 finalists exhibited and $507,000 awarded. A $1 million philanthropic gift from the Bowness Family Foundation has lifted the prize pool to $70,000, making it the richest photography award in Australia. The 2025 exhibition is curated by Anouska Phizacklea, Director of the Museum of Australian Photography, who also joined judges Shaune Lakin and Anne Zahalka in selecting the fifty finalists from more than 750 entries. “It’s an honour to be involved in the twentieth iteration of the Bowness Photography Prize,” Lakin said, calling it “an award that celebrates current photographic practice, MAPh as a centre for practice, and the Bowness family’s role as long-standing patrons of Australian photography.” Zahalka described it as “a groundbreaking contemporary photo-media award”, and MAPh Foundation Chair Megan Peart noted that this year would be “a celebration of emerging and established Australian photographers” as the $50,000 winner is announced tomorrow.
During my visit, the space never felt static. Visitors lingered at the labels, phones raised to photograph works, quietly debating their favourites. Some stood silent before Sir Willy, pointing out the flowers in the elder’s beard; others stepped back from Treadmill to let the tremor of its light subside. The rooms felt less like a contest than a conversation.
What they encountered was not triumphalism but a kind of fertile friction. The most persuasive works resist photography’s old bargains — the fast read, the single vantage, the tidy proof — and ask for slower exchange. Certain preoccupations recur with unusual insistence: sovereignty and custodianship; deep time and material trace; the ethics of looking, especially in portraiture; and the uneasy beauty of an environment in crisis. The exhibition reads less like a verdict than a set of live problems, staged with care. Not every work can be lingered on here; the strongest seem less like single statements than live questions.
Anna Higgins’s Two horizons (2025) sets the tone — patient, layered, exacting. A mirrored diptych drawn from 16 mm, softened through in-camera double exposures and veiled by white screenprints from 8 mm stills, it doesn’t offer sightlines so much as atmospheres. Higgins has long worried at the boundary between film and photograph, foreground and palimpsest. Here, the mountain light she observed in the Victorian Alps seems to arrive already remembered. The surface is slow; time is stratified. It’s not just that two moments are folded into one — the work makes you feel how a photographic “now” is always an accumulation: exposure, selection, printing, inscription. Higgins’s restraint could drift into mannerism in lesser hands. Here it reads as ethics: a refusal to plunder the scene for a “view”, a commitment to let time’s layers stay visible.
Odette England’s Anatomy of tossing (cause and effect) (2024–25) approaches memory from the other end — not overlaying, but unveiling. She prints thirteen images onto the sun-bleached backs of vintage album pages, the ghosts of whatever once lived there lingering as pale trapezoids and ovals. Over those absences she places small photographs of rocks mid-flight, trajectories implied but never resolved. England’s broader practice — from Dairy Character to her work on family archives — has taught us to read the photograph as an object that accrues touch and loss. Here she literalises that lesson: the album pages become archaeological surfaces, and the new images supply not closure but the productive nuisance of cause and effect without narrative. The throwing is minor, almost childish; the pages insist it is anything but. The piece reminds the prize, pointedly, that not all “new work” lies in the novelty of capture. Sometimes it’s a matter of reading what the medium forgot to remember.
Naomi Hobson’s Sir Willy, a warrior without a weapon (2025) holds the room through poise rather than heat. Hobson’s portraiture — from the chromatic charge of Adolescent Wonderland to the dignified self-styling in Stranger in My Skin — is anchored in Coen on Cape York and grounded in the sovereignty of self-presentation. Here, a respected elder sits with quiet assurance, beard threaded with flowers gathered on Country. It’s a simple act of adornment that performs a complex refusal: of colonial caricatures of Aboriginal masculinity, of mainstream photography’s appetite for either spectacle or misery. Hobson’s picture resists the melodrama that can surface in prize exhibitions. That’s its power. It requires no moralising caption, no borrowed mood. It trusts the dignity in front of the lens and demands that the viewer do the same.
Where Hobson composes continuity, Ali Tahayori fashions a structure from fracture. Sisterhood (Broken) (2025) takes an inherited Iranian studio portrait and reassembles it as a lattice of glass shards that catches the light like a living seam. Tahayori’s Archive of Longing has traced queer diasporic identity as a choreography of repair — page, pane and memory all subject to breakage and mend. Here the break is retained as architecture: the splintered faces will not return to seamlessness because the seam is the point. If the museum protects, the work asks, what does protection look like for those whose archives are damaged by displacement or silence? Tahayori’s answer is form as proof: the crack as a record of care, not catastrophe. There is risk in the beauty — the glint of glass can seduce — but the work keeps you moving, reconstituting the image as you shift, refusing closure.
Stephen Dupont’s A momentary lapse of reason (2025) loosens the show’s immaculate surfaces. Shot in Varanasi, the picture holds a wash of patterned cloths as they sag and snap in wind, bamboo frames bowing under their own logic, human figures blurred to apparition. Dupont’s reputation was built on sharply observed conflict zones and charged portraiture; he could have turned this scene into a set-piece of the picturesque. He doesn’t. The instability is the point. The frame feels provisional, almost too thin to bear the flux it records. In a prize context, that modesty is unexpected and refreshing. The photograph neither sanctifies the sacred nor fetishises the hand-worn; it notes a system — of labour, of faith, of fabric — perpetually on the edge of undoing, and trusts us to read it.
Sonia Payes’s Sentinel of the inevitable (2025) takes the opposite route: scale and polish, nine-panel photographic installation acting like a shrine to maternal futurity. Payes photographs her daughter’s face as a mirrored orb, cords trailing as if both umbilical and digital, then assembles the parts into a commanding wall work made deliberately without AI. The refusal of machine learning is a rhetorical move, but it’s more than rhetoric; the piece is riddled with small, chosen imperfections that keep the human trace visible against the cool techno-surface. Payes has always pushed portraiture toward anthropomorphic sculpture; here the post-human glint feels both seductive and warning. If the ambition occasionally tips toward the declarative — the “sentinel” metaphor is a little on-the-nose — the installation’s force is undeniable. It’s a work about care at scale, and about what care becomes when mediation is the air we breathe.
Ingvar Kenne’s Dordordonga on Taungurung Country [Mount Buffalo NP, VIC] (2024) answers that post-human chill with a slower trust in land as relation rather than backdrop. Kenne’s career has passed through unflinching portraits of subcultures; in recent years, his attention has turned outward, not to the scenic but to the ongoing. This image holds its breath long enough for reciprocity to register. Nothing is “captured”. Instead, the print reads like a ledger entry in a longer conversation — another instance where the prize acknowledges that “subject matter” is not a given but a responsibility.
James Tylor cuts that responsibility into the surface. Tapa-arra through the landscape 1, 4, 5 (2024) quite literally marks the land with voids, an act of photographic incision that traces pre-colonial routes — songlines, trade paths — through an Australia overlaid by settler roads. Tylor’s photo-sculptural practice, spanning Kaurna and Māori heritage, has long stitched the past into the present; the black clefts in these prints operate simultaneously as erasure and assertion. You see the violence of removal and the persistence of the routes themselves. The didactic risk — the temptation to read the works as simply “teaching aids” — is real. Tylor avoids it by letting the cuts do their double work: they are legible, yes, but they’re also ambivalent artefacts of force that don’t tidy themselves into metaphor.
Kent Morris composes protection rather than incision. Spotted pardalote and murnong (2025) gathers deep-time ancestral patterning around a small bird whose presence oscillates between found and fugitive. Morris’s digital tessellations build sovereign space: not the land claimed, but Country held. Across his long series embedding urban birds within First Nations design systems, the geometry offers shelter against erasure. The clarity of the proposition is bracing: culture as pattern that persists, ecology as survival strategy. If at times the visual system threatens to over-determine the image — the geometry so assertive that the bird risks becoming emblem rather than companion — the ambition remains clear: an insistence that sovereignty can be pictured not as property but as relation.
Wei Weng’s Mother’s waves (2025) pursues relation where legal language fails. The work is part of Weng’s Museum of Lost Heirs, an ongoing project in which the artist treats inheritance as fable and archive at once, collaborating with AI chat agents and piecing together photographs, notes and artefacts into provisional kinships. Mother’s waves is presented in a lacquered display case that reads like a domestic reliquary rather than a forensic cabinet: digital prints, hand-written fragments, a set of images photographed, with permission, in artist Sarah Goffman’s home. Weng’s method — “photobook thinking” constructed for the wall — courts the risk of over-presentation; yet the work holds, because the fiction is acknowledged and the longing is real. It’s a careful study in what counts as evidence when the family story has gaps by design.
Zo Damage’s Perspective (2025) translates that longing into a materially graspable grammar. Six hand-built cubes, each face a gelatin-silver print — bridges, tracks, industrial waterways — are arranged so that each image doubles against its counterpart, affluence set beside working-class cityscapes. The work feels like syntax you can touch. Damage, better known for chronicling Melbourne’s live music scenes, pivots to sculpture without smoothing her documentary instincts: the cubes remain honest about the labour of making, edges visible, surfaces worn. The piece invokes displacement (the title nods to a Townes Van Zandt song without collapsing into its dirge) and proposes hope as a structural possibility: turn the cube, re-place the gaps, read the city from another side. It’s a modestly scaled work that lingers because it gives you a form for re-arranging how you think.
A small archival capsule titled Unearth the Stories Behind the Winning Works gathers contact sheets, maquettes, installation photographs, and posters of past Bowness Prize winners. It could have been a victory lap; instead it demystifies. You see how earlier works were shaped by material choices and by accidents hardened into intent. Rather than coronating the past, it threads it back into the present, showing how prizes point backward as much as forward.
The largest gallery lengthens the stride and lowers the temperature. There’s air between pictures; you feel the rooms thinking.
Kai Wasikowski’s The bees and the ledger: NB (scenes 1–27) (2024) reaches for a kind of quiet liturgy. Twenty-seven square photographs — the artist’s grandmother Natalia Broadhurst studying, tending bees, gardening, accounting for a life rebuilt after migrating from Poland in the 1970s — accrete into a year’s uneventful grace. Wasikowski has worked consistently at the border between ecology and kinship, and here the sequence trusts repetition to do what scale often attempts: register care as a system. The images are neither sentimental nor austere. They trade in small particulars. The effect is cumulative: a portrait of labour that understands labour as love, and love as record-keeping. In a prize context, the refusal of the single “hero” image is itself a proposition about what counts.
Guy Grabowsky’s Treadmill (2025) vibrates at the opposite frequency. Captured after dusk in Times Square during his MFA in New York, the work translates the trembling grid of a cinematic billboard — scattered dead pixels, fractured fields of light — through a deliberately layered chain: digital to analogue, analogue back to digital, before being printed in Australia as a large pigment ink-jet print. The image foregrounds its own making: an indexical rendering of digital light exposed onto analogue film, then reconstituted as a physical object.
Grabowsky invokes Plato’s cave, suggesting that our contemporary illusions are no longer shadows cast by fire but flickers cast by machines. The photograph embraces this conceptual clarity: it is less a single spectacle than a diagram of translation, its energy held in process rather than affect. The experience remains cool, even cerebral, yet it resists the temptation to polish away its own instability. In a field where “spectacle” and “critique of spectacle” can cancel each other out, Treadmill holds its ground by letting the tremor remain a tremor.
Sarah Rhodes’s Chamber of projection I (2025) offers a counter-measure: analogue depth. A limestone cave rendered as brain, a brain rendered as cave, its stalactites and roots bleeding together, the surface reverberant with hand-applied chemical blooms. Rhodes’s series borrows its subtitle from Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace for good reason; the photograph is phenomenological rather than illustrative, less a symbol of the subconscious than an invitation to inhabit the porosity between inner and outer. The picture risks prettiness — velvety silver-gelatin can seduce as easily as LED — but the handwork interrupts smoothness, leaving the surface to do what surfaces do best: misbehave.
Tamara Dean is unafraid of the story a surface can carry. No place like home (2024), part of her project The future is now, takes the syntax of the fashion spread and floods it. A woman in red heels levitates from a drowned streetscape while loose pages from the COP23 report flutter around her. Dean has long been a master of the staged photograph that wears its artifice openly — a theatre where you can see the ropes — and here the artifice is weaponised toward climate grief. The danger is that beauty will blunt urgency; in this frame, gloss does two things at once. It seduces (always) and, crucially, it indicts the very economy that made such images possible. Dean’s image asks what kind of “home” we mean when the set itself is a sinking stage. Whether the question lands depends on how allergic you are to theatricality. For me, the cut still works; the photograph’s moral is earned by its formal clarity.
Morganna Magee’s Kangaroo portrait (2025) works by its refusal to perform. A male kangaroo stands before the lens without bravado or cuteness and meets the camera’s gaze. Magee cites philosopher Cynthia Freeland’s definition of portraiture as reciprocal recognition, and you feel the reciprocity here not as an idea but as time. It is not a mascot or a pest, but a citizen — recognised as such precisely because the image refuses spectacle. In a room that holds several loud images, Magee’s stillness returns the stakes of portraiture to their basics: who is seen, by whom, and on what terms.
Hoda Afshar’s Untitled #6 from Code Black/Riot (2024) was made with First Nations youth in Far North Queensland, in a context where families often keep no photographs for fear of state identification. The work forms part of a larger project with Vernon Ah Kee and Behrouz Boochani that interrogates a system that targets and imprisons Aboriginal children from the age of ten. Here, a girl stands level to the lens while another hand lifts a bright gerbera to her temple — a gesture that reads at once as adornment, as target, as shield. Participants were invited to choose how they appeared; concealment became part of the composition. Afshar has remade Australian portraiture by returning ethics to the centre of form: consent as composition, refusal as pose. The image is luminous yet unsentimental, holding grace without softening its demand. It asks us to recognise that visibility is not a given but a negotiation — and that to appear on one’s own terms can be an act of resistance.
Eugenia Raskopoulos’s untitled #1 from embedded bones (2024) collapses archaeology onto the body. An X-ray of the artist’s spine overlays a toppled Athenian column; bone echoes fluting; the body appears already a ruin and a record. Raskopoulos’s practice has long moved between language, trauma and embodiment, translating one system of marks into another. Here, the translation is stark and moving: disease and ageing are not affronts to an aesthetic ideal but the very signatures by which a life becomes legible to itself. The image’s chill — the coolness of medical imaging — is offset by the vulnerability of the declaration. The artist is the artefact.
Justine Varga’s Time immemorial (126,749 years) (2024–25) replaces the world’s picture with the world’s trace. The negative has been exposed in a particle accelerator, subatomic collisions etching themselves into the emulsion. Varga’s cameraless practice has long relied on touch, breath, the slow accretion of bodily inscription; this work shifts from intimacy to epoch without abandoning the premise that photography is first a material encounter. The print reads like a pale monolith scorched at the edges, a shard of evidence from a time scale that refuses the human. It’s the show’s clearest statement that “image” is too small a word for what the medium can hold.
Isabella Capezio threads these wagers back to the ground. Upside-down Country (2025) sets a conventional chromogenic landscape against an abstract panel born from silver-halide reactions with water taken from a gold-mine site. The Dja Dja Wurrung term in the title names the ecological injury wrought by mining — the forests upended, the waterways re-routed, the soil stripped — and Capezio lets chemistry speak where rhetoric would be blunt. If the diptych form is familiar, the charge comes from a disciplined refusal of melodrama. One panel tells you what you think you know; the other shows you a process you cannot see unaided. Together they insist that landscape, as a genre, must either account for extraction or admit it has become a style.
The side spaces temper argument with attention.
Shea Kirk’s Kun (left and right view) (2025) uses a twin-lens, large-format set-up to make two portraits of the same sitter at precisely the same moment. The parallax is minute; the effect is decisive. Doubled in time, the subject is neither split nor fused; instead, the portrait extends the instant into duration. Kirk’s meticulous studio craft risks fetishising technique, but the rig is always in service of the sitter’s presence. You feel the discipline as care.
Across the way, Gerrie Mifsud’s Aloe (2025) stages individuality as a quiet form of resistance. The sitter is described by the artist as someone who defies mainstream fashion cycles, a devotee of slow fashion who chooses garments to last. The portrait declines the usual glamour of fashion photography for something steadier: stewardship over churn. Mifsud’s control is exact — lighting that dignifies without flattering, a palette that respects the clothes as evidence rather than costume. It is a modest picture with a large claim tucked inside it: that appearance is not a mask to be torn away but a practice through which a self is kept.
Riste Andrievski’s A landscape that is shaping me (2025) opens landscape outward to interior weather. A wide ink-jet image, part escarpment and part inner cloud, it reads as a record of mutual inscription — place made visible in a person, a person carved back into a place. Andrievski’s diasporic attention keeps the image from dissolving into ambience; there is an ache in the scale, a recognition that belonging is less a state than a practice made day by day.
Siri Hayes puts practice underfoot. From amongst it I (2025) is a chromogenic photogram assembled blind in the colour darkroom from feathers, plant fragments and rinsed rubbish gathered along the Birrarung, the artist stepping into the exposure so that her silhouette holds the debris in suspension. Placed flat on the floor, the work requires you to orbit and bow; looking becomes embodied, almost liturgical. Hayes refuses the fantasy that the human can stand apart from the mess it makes. The piece is forensic without cynicism, lyrical without denial.
Around Hayes, a tight cluster turns the body into an instrument for misrecognition and renewal. Yvette Hamilton’s Celestial #2 uses a decommissioned telescope lens as both subject and tool, letting sunlight expose the paper through the glass that once looked outward — a halo of what the lens has seen, a relic of attention. Nur Aishah Abdullah Farid Kenton’s Sayang registers intimacy and obligation across generations without collapsing either into sentimentality, knowing that love is a discipline. Gerwyn Davies’s Trick mirror gleefully dissolves the artist under sculptural costume, queering the very premise that photography should reveal anything stable about a body at all. Pete Volich’s Vukojebina (where wolves go to fuck) #2 is a nocturne of grief and persistence, folding illness and displacement into garden negatives reworked through CMYK separation — mourning given work to do. And Zoë Croggon’s half life closes the loop by cutting and collaging surveillance stills into abstracted human forms, movement becoming residue and residue becoming monument: a cool, elegant reminder that our self-images are increasingly made by machines we did not grant permission to look.
If the exhibition sometimes strains under the weight of its own seriousness — a prize can turn urgency into rhetoric if it isn’t careful — MAPh’s twentieth Bowness deftly avoids the worst traps. Its checklist is capacious without being pious, and, crucially, the museum has made public the real resource the show is asking of its artists: time.
Time to collaborate ethically (Afshar).
Time to learn from Country rather than extract from it (Kenne).
Time to accept that repair is neither clean nor conclusive (Tahayori).
Time to let a family story accrue in small scenes, a ledger instead of a declaration (Wasikowski).
Time to treat an archive as a living organism, not a cabinet (England).
Time to admit that chemistry can speak where words grow thin (Varga, Capezio).
Time, even, to let a kangaroo be a citizen and not a cartoon (Magee).
Not every bet pays off. A few high-concept images feel lighter than their captions; the occasional polish strains for grandeur and misses the moral. But taken together, the finalists map where Australian photography’s strongest energies are now: in the refusal of spectacle for its own sake; in the insistence that form and ethics are inseparable; in the willingness to let evidence include touch, breath, pattern, silence, fracture. The prize reads, finally, less like a scoreboard for winners than a weather report for the medium’s climate.
BY THE TIME I return to the threshold wall, its symmetry has loosened. What first read as clean lists now feels like sediment, layers of ambition and care. The Bowness at twenty does not offer a single narrative of Australian photography, and that is its quiet triumph. It gathers practices that resist resolution — images built from fracture, from archives pulled inside out, from gestures of care made durable by their very fragility — and allows them to coexist without forcing consensus. Not every work lands; a few risk polish over depth, or posture over clarity. Yet the overall impression is of a field in vigorous redefinition, moving beyond the instant, the trophy image, toward photography as process, relation and ethical experiment.
Outside, the building folds back into its quiet shape among the trees. The air is bright again, but slower. Some photographs follow me like weather, shifting in and out of shape as I walk away. Others stay behind, still working, still watching.
Exhibition Details
William & Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2025
Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), Wheelers Hill, Victoria
On view from 13 September to 9 November 2025, the exhibition is curated by Anouska Phizacklea, Director of MAPh, with the judging panel comprising Shaune Lakin, Anne Zahalka and Anouska Phizacklea. The prize offers a total of $70,000, including the $50,000 Major Prize, two $2,500 Honourable Mentions, the $10,000 Wai Tang Commissioning Award, and the $5,000 People’s Choice Award.
Entry is free.
Further information: maph.org.au
