National Photography Prize 2022

Small acts of resistance is a portrait series amplifying personal gestures of resistance. The triptych configuration of each work plays on the traditional trifold frames of both the conventional family portrait and religious altarpiece.

Family Portrait challenges conventional concepts of family in a hyper-visual tableau vivant of non-conformity. In this queer chosen family, two fathers and their loving friends make up the familial support network around the newborn.

Eric depicts Eric Avery, a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr artist who plays the violin, singing the language of his father’s country. Here he floats above a road, a colonial scar pointing between his ancestral lands.

The final triptych features members of the renowned ballroom collective House of Slé, centring House mother Bhenji Ra. Wrapped in culturally significant symbology, the Slè family appears held by the magnetism of water and cosmos.

In centring non-conforming pathways, Small acts of resistance invites a reorientation of dominant narratives as a site of renewal and reworlding.

Listen to Amos Gebhardt discuss their series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

Decay Theory is a multi-media body of work informed by the Swedish sugar experiments, carried out between 1945-1954 at Vipeholm Hospital in southern Sweden. The sugar experiments involved feeding the intellectually disabled residents of the hospital excessive sweets in order to effect then research tooth decay.

The image of the face is central to the Decay Theory project, standing in as a symbol for the patients at Vipeholm who were subjected to treatments that they could not orally consent to, due to their function variations.

A visual database consisting of still photography, moving image, and a web-based archive is presented as Decay Theory Repository. The act of accumulation and documentation culminating in an online museum of teeth and the mouth.

Listen to Caitlin E Littlewood discuss her series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

This work started as a consideration of Frederick McCubbin’s 1889 painting Down on his Luck. Transplanted into current times, who would McCubbin’s disheartened swagman be? In this work the answer is a Rodeo Clown.

From that point an open-ended narrative evolves. For the Rodeo Clown there is the discovery of colonial discourse and an understanding of privilege, as well as an unfortunate turn on the pokies and an untimely end in his pride and joy.

The image of the clown hangs over the wrecked ute, Aime Cesaire’s text and footage of the gambling room. He may no longer be of this world, but he has not passed through either. Cross, a Worimi man, has built this unresolved story as a way of testing how privilege, guilt, and race inform our contemporary lives and aid historical constructions of national identity.

Listen to Dean Cross discuss his series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

In Back Home From Home, Golding holds a white cast reproduction of a Victorian fence in position of a shield. The fence represents those of Redfern, the inner-city Sydney neighbourhood that Golding’s family moved to in 1974, and where Golding was born and raised.

The work shows Golding gesturing to his family’s return to Country. He is photographed standing between his grandparent’s hometowns of Moree and Collarenebri.

The fence, typically a marker of space and ownership extends in an embrace and welcomes rather than excludes. Surrounded by his flat Country, there is a sense of safety and comfort, he is at peace in the landscape, one only felt by being back home.

Listen to Dennis Golding discuss his series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

The five works here all deal in the creative potential of destructive processes. For three works: Encrypted, Lost then Found; Sapphires Lay in Broken Emeralds; and Untitled Ruins this destruction includes methods of scratching, painting, engraving and piercing photographic negatives to produce large scale prints without the use of camera.

The two works titled Symbiotic Surface are made by combining digital photographic techniques with analogue outputs. Images captured on a phone are abstracted, digitally printed on to a transparency and then printed in a darkroom. All digital information, the pixels of the images, are lost in the light of the analogue photo process and destroyed in the printing.

These unconventional approaches to image making result in compelling photographs that oppose a traditional understanding of photography as a tool to document reality.

Listen to Guy Grabowksy discuss his series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

Conversations with Trees is based on work that Janet Laurence undertook for her solo exhibition 'Entangled Garden for Plant Memory' at the Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art in Nantou City, Taiwan, 2020.

The exhibition was an opportunity for the artist to explore the mountainous region of Nantou and weave the natural forest in with the historical botanical collection of the National University of Taipei.

Images of the forest are printed on transparent duraclear and suspended in front of mirrors, recalling greenhouse windows or museum display cases—forms of mediation of nature.

The ‘garden’ is a metaphor that expresses Laurence’s view about the cosmos, in which all living creatures converge, engage and communicate through an intricate network. She regularly conceives individual works as part of a greater whole to mirror the interconnectivity of the natural world and of humanity’s place within its systems.

All Auras Touch is a snapshot of contemporary Australia revealed through the process of photographing human energy fields, otherwise known as auras. Taking the main occupation list from the Australian Census as the starting point, artist Kate Mitchell aimed to photograph the aura of one person for each of the 1,023 recognised occupations.

Using electromagnetic field imaging equipment, participants of All Auras Touch had their aura portrait taken by the artist, with 980 members of the public participating. Each aura portrait forms a vital component of the work, collectively creating an energetic snapshot of the Australian workforce.

The work was made during devastating bushfires, followed by floods and ended one week prior to the first Covid lockdown in Sydney. As things currently stand, this work would be challenging to make in the present circumstances and for the foreseeable future.

Listen to Kate Mitchell discuss her series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

Dribble, Leak, Suck, Slip, Skin, Peel, Pick, is a series of images made through a variety of processes including: re-photography, scanning, using found images from personal archives, straight photography, and digitally manipulated photography. Each process is used to test the idea of the Photographic, asking what it is and how can the materials and understanding of them be bent to raise questions.

Eight of the images have small glass tubes inserted through the image, like devices designed to take a core sample of a body that does not exist beyond its surface.

This series is interested in what is seen and what is obscured, what is left out or lost in a photographic process – an idea of simultaneous obscuring and showing. I want to ask what exists beyond the surface. What can be seen through it being unseen?

Listen to Kiron Robinson discuss his series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

"This set of vertical panoramic photos document the Atelier Brancusi, a recreation of sculptor Constantin Brancusi's studio in Paris. Surrounded by a corridor, visitors look into each of the studio's four spaces through glass walls. I used a 1920s medium-format camera, inherited from my grandmother, to map the studio, attempting to capture: its three-dimensionality; the reflections and doublings that occur because of the glass, and the organic repetitions of forms that occur in Brancusi's sculptures.

To amplify this sense of spatial doubling and shifting, I exposed the negatives multiple times, with slight adjustments to the position of the camera. The visual refractions and complexities in the photos echo the experience of being in the Brancusi studio with its refracting views and repetition of forms."
-Luke Parker

Listen to Luke Parker discuss his series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

"Many of my ancestors and ancestral lands have been captured by early photographers and anthropologists traversing our Country. I have come across them inshattered glass-plates, in blurred slides, in photocopied printouts, filed away in archival cabinets.

With this series of works I am appropriating techniques used by these photographers to reclaim the spirit and Tjukurpa (all-encompassing cultural law) of my ancestorsthat still live within this landscape.

These photos don’t only depict the landscape, they are the landscape. Much like my ancestors are still part of this landscape in spirit, the living landscape resounds within these images.

Using a UV-sensitive chemical process, I have worked with and have been informed by the elements. This process attempts to expose the relationship between viewer and landscape, Tjukurpa and Country.

In some of the images the land speaks for itself, in others I have used stencils to emulate propaganda posters forcefully asserting the urgency with which we need to recognise: this land is sacred Manta (earth) is sacred. It holds our ancestors and will hold us one day. Manta miil-miilpa. These images mirror the living essence that is inside of us all."
- Robert Fielding

My Body In Pieces / Body in my Pieces, is a photographic installation featuring five wall-mounted, annotated photographs and a freestanding photographic sculpture.

"In this installation, I have integrated ideas of my own body and history into photographs from my family archive. My father and uncle were bodybuilders in Mumbai in the 1960s: the photographs present them posing and flexing their torsos and legs for maximum muscle definition. They took up body building in India before their migration to Australia, inspired by Hollywood films and a belief that strong masculine physiques would aid in their integration into white Australia.

In this work, I respond to this past, my limbs overlay flexing arm muscles and masculine bodies draped with the shiny Thai fabrics given to me by my mother."
-Sara Oscar

Listen to Sara Oscar discuss her series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.

These four photographic prints use images taken on Bidayǔh native lands in Sarawak, in rivers where Baker’s mother played as a child and on ancestral farm lands.

These images are autostereograms, also known as Magic Eye images, a nostalgic optical illusion technology that was very popular in the 1990s during the artist’s childhood. Embedded in these images are forgotten or rarely used Bidayǔh words that are about wandering, collecting and foraging.

Serian Bidayǔh language has hundreds of terms for activities that speak to a daily rhythm of moving through the jungle and working intimately with plant life. In current semi-Industrialised Bidayǔh society, these words are almost never used and have been left behind. These images are incantations to evoke the old knowledge these words hold. They suggest that if we learn to see the natural world in a slightly different way, we can access another way of knowing and moving.

Listen to Tiyan Baker discuss her series of works in the National Photography Prize 2022.