Graduate awards rarely announce revolutions. What they register instead is pressure — the quiet consolidation of sensibilities before they disperse into the wider field. The 2025 GradFoto Award, presented by the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, does not propose a new movement or aesthetic manifesto. It reveals something subtler: a recalibration of scale.
Across the works recognised this year, urgency is not staged through spectacle. It is compressed into gesture, surface, proximity. These photographs do not compete for volume. They insist on attention. What emerges is not a retreat from contemporary concerns — migration, transformation, ecology, cultural continuity, belonging — but a deliberate refusal to inflate them beyond what the image can hold.
Now in its sixth year, GradFoto recognises twenty graduating photographers from institutions across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The 2025 finalists were selected by documentary photographer Daniella Zalcman, founder of Women Photograph. Zalcman’s citations emphasise tonal strength, emotional clarity, compositional assurance. The works she singled out do not seek novelty through disruption. They build through restraint.
At the centre of the award stands Minh An Pham’s Rồi một ngày con sẽ mất – Someday I will lose you, recipient of the AUD $1,000 prize. Around it unfold Kevin Bernardin’s chromatic assertion in Before and After Drag, Angus Scott’s disciplined botanical scrutiny in Tending the Invasion, Daniela Rodriguez’s tactile affirmation in Echoes of Elsewhere, and Michaela Ottone’s inscribed intimacy in Thank you for letting me be myself. Taken together, they do not construct a thesis. They establish a tempo — one that resists the inflationary logic of the present.
Minh An Pham: Transport Without Movement
Minh An Pham, a graduate of RMIT University, structures his series around distance from home and the tenderness he feels toward his mother. Zalcman described the work as “poignant and soulful,” praising its strong visual voice and its movement between public and private scenes of familial life. She noted in particular the use of colour, textile and the natural world.
One photograph crystallises the series’ logic. A mother and son sit astride a life-sized horse sculpture in a garden dense with saturated greenery. Palm fronds crowd the frame. A tiled structure appears behind them. The ground beneath is tiled rather than earthen. The horse, painted brown with a green harness, implies motion but remains fixed.
The mother’s hand rests lightly on the horse’s neck. The son’s arm encircles her waist. In his other hand, a cable trails downward — a thin contemporary interruption in an otherwise pastoral scene. Neither figure smiles. Their expressions are steady, composed, unperformed.
The image is lush yet controlled. Nature is curated. The horse is transport without movement. The cable is connection without narrative explanation. Intimacy is framed within artifice.
The title — Someday I will lose you — positions the series in anticipation. The photographs do not dramatise loss; they inhabit the present under its shadow. The abundance of green intensifies rather than cancels that awareness. The future absence presses quietly against the present image.
Pham’s strength lies in compression. There are no overt gestures of grief, no heightened sentiment. Proximity carries the weight. The immobilised horse becomes a subtle hinge — the suggestion of travel held in suspension. The image does not declare migration; it implies distance through stillness.
In a visual culture that frequently equates emotional urgency with escalation, Pham reduces scale. The effect is not diminished intensity but concentrated pressure. The viewer is not overwhelmed. They are asked to remain.
Kevin Bernardin: Saturation as Presence
Kevin Bernardin’s Before and After Drag, recognised with both the AUD $500 People’s Choice Award and a Highly Commended distinction, operates in a different register yet shares the same discipline. Zalcman likened the series’ transition from black-and-white to colour to a “Wizard of Oz-style” shift into joy, while emphasising that the monochrome “before” images retain warmth and quiet assurance.
In Ruby Slippers After, the performer stands against a seamless red background so saturated it erases depth. One leg lifts, skirt flares outward in layered motion. Red heels glitter under studio light. Feathers rise from a headpiece; oversized floral arrangements extend from the body’s side; jewellery catches and refracts colour. The mouth is open mid-exclamation.
The image is exuberant, yet the composition is exact. The red field isolates the figure; there is no audience, no environmental cue. The raised leg implies motion, but the photograph arrests it. Saturation does not spill; it is contained.
Bernardin’s conceptual hinge — black-and-white preparation followed by colour performance — could risk simplification. It does not. The monochrome images are not depicted as repression. They are intimate, reflective, interior. The move into colour marks expansion rather than rupture. Transformation is continuous, not oppositional.
Importantly, the camera does not sensationalise drag as spectacle for external consumption. It attends to construction — costume, gesture, embodiment. The red background functions as both stage and void. Presence is asserted without surrendering compositional control.
Where Pham compresses inevitability into stillness, Bernardin compresses transformation into saturation. Both reduce scale in different directions. Both insist that intensity need not be loud.
Angus Scott: The Precision of Shadow
Angus Scott’s Tending the Invasion, Highly Commended, turns toward invasive blackberry plants and their entanglement with built and natural environments. Zalcman described the work as equally clinical and beautiful, highlighting a macro image of a blackberry seed resting on a fingertip.
In another photograph, a slender blackberry stem rises vertically against a near-black background. Thorns line its length in small, rhythmic intervals. Leaves show signs of wear — browned edges, slight curling. Light grazes the upper leaves; the lower portion dissolves into shadow. There is no horizon, no contextual framing.
The plant is not dramatised. It is examined.
The project’s title juxtaposes care and threat. “Tending” implies stewardship; “invasion” implies disruption. Scott refuses to inflate this tension. By isolating the plant, he collapses ecological discourse into specimen. The viewer is drawn close enough to register texture, fragility, damage.
In an era saturated with environmental crisis imagery, Scott’s subtraction reads as deliberate. The darkness surrounding the stem is not theatrical; it is containment. Scale contracts. The plant remains plant.
This precision recalibrates urgency. The image does not announce catastrophe. It asks for scrutiny.
Daniela Rodriguez: Continuity in the Palm
Daniela Rodriguez’s Echoes of Elsewhere, also Highly Commended, engages food, dance, clothing and flora as expressions of cultural identity. Zalcman underscored the significance of using photography to resist cultural erasure, particularly given the medium’s historical entanglement with colonial systems of representation.
One photograph presents a pair of aged hands cupped together in direct sunlight. The skin is lined and textured. A wedding band glints faintly. Resting in the palms is a single red flower, its green leaves intact. The background recedes entirely.
The gesture is simple: hands open, flower held. The sunlight is unsoftened; shadows articulate the creases of the palms. There is no romantic haze. The bloom is vivid against weathered skin.
Culture here is not abstract symbol but material continuity. The flower is neither decorative prop nor allegory. It is offered. The camera remains close to touch.
Rodriguez’s restraint mirrors Scott’s discipline. She does not aestheticise heritage. She isolates it in gesture. The image holds continuity without spectacle.
Michaela Ottone: Inscribing Belonging
Michaela Ottone’s Thank you for letting me be myself layers image and inscription. Zalcman described the project as an “elevated scrapbook,” combining cinematic portraiture with handwritten notes and collage elements.
In one black-and-white photograph, two women stand apart in an arid landscape — scrub, distant hills, open sky. The terrain feels distinctly Australian. The image alone reads as quiet documentation.
Across the frame, handwritten text appears: “Belonging… we cooked together & listened to music & watched the stars… in that place we knew we belonged together. I love you x.”
The inscription interrupts photographic authority. The photograph records; the handwriting testifies. Geography is referenced, but the emotional centre rests in the word “belonging.”
The black-and-white tonality introduces archival weight. The handwritten text injects present intimacy. Authorship becomes layered. Memory is not singular; it is collaborative.
Ottone’s project does not use the scrapbook as nostalgia. It uses inscription to complicate image. Belonging is written directly across the frame, refusing to remain implicit.
Against Inflation
The 2025 GradFoto Award finalists span institutions including RMIT University, Photography Studies College, the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of New South Wales, the University of Wollongong, Auckland University of Technology, Massey University’s Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, and Dunedin School of Art. The field is dispersed rather than centralised.
What unites the recognised works is not aesthetic uniformity but compression. Each artist recalibrates scale.
Pham holds anticipation without escalation.
Bernardin asserts presence without chaos.
Scott examines without alarm.
Rodriguez affirms without exoticising.
Ottone inscribes without sentimentalising.
In a visual environment that rewards speed and amplification, this reduction of scale carries force. To refuse spectacle in a spectacle-saturated culture is not withdrawal; it is decision. To compress urgency into gesture is to trust that attention still matters.
The 2025 GradFoto Award does not declare a generational rupture. It reveals a disposition: an insistence that images can still hold weight without shouting.
The works recognised this year do not compete for volume. They ask something more demanding. They ask the viewer to stay.
And in staying, pressure accumulates — not through noise, but through the quiet density of what the image refuses to release.
Online Exhibition: 2025 GradFoto Award
