2025 National Photographic Portrait Prize

Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope

2025 National Photographic Portrait Prize | Various Artists

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra | 16 August – 12 October 2025

Then touring nationally - Cairns, Mount Gambier, Geraldton & Horsham | between 6 December 2025 & 26 January 2027

Now in its 18th year, the National Photographic Portrait Prize supports and celebrates photographic portraiture in Australia. There are many great works in this exhibition of finalists, only some of which I will discuss here.

The winner for 2025 is Untitled #01 (from the series Code Black/Riot) 2024 by Hoda Afshar, a Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist whose practice focuses on the intricate relationships between politics and aesthetics, knowledge and representation, visibility and violence. All participants in the series were invited to use a means of their own choosing to conceal their identities while making a personal statement. The three First Nations youngsters in this image chose to conceal their faces to avoid being identified by the youth justice system.

Untitled #01 (from the series Code Black/Riot) 2024 © Hoda Afshar

 

When we viewed the exhibition, both my companion and I observed that there were numerous images of (and by) members of the LGBTQIA+ and Indigenous Australian communities. Amongst them is Hilary Wardhaugh’s Zev and Nick, 2025, their relationship revealed partly by the image and also by the accompanying artist statement. Mary-Lou Orliyarli Divilli’s Langi, 2024, is a portrait of her niece Violet, which “personifies the pride that goes with belonging, skills, knowing about your heritage and living within your culture.” Gerwyn Davies is a queer artist who works across photography, textile, and costume. He takes a “performative approach to photographic portraiture, exploring self-representation, camp aesthetics and kitsch Australiana.” His Bather, 2024, is a delightful example of that.

Zev and Nick, 2025 © Hilary Wardhaugh

Langi, 2024 © Mary-Lou Orliyarli Divilli

 

Bather, 2024 © Gerwyn Davies

T W Baker’s image Waiting on the Wet, 2024 has an interesting back story. It was taken in between massive afternoon downpours. A roll of Italian, medium-format cinema film jammed in Baker’s camera, but he managed to salvage and store it in a light-tight pouch away from the brutal sun and humidity. Two days later that pouch was opened by a curious member of the Darwin Airport security team. A week later, after processing the film in Sydney, it appeared that the harsh Top End of Australia had left its mark.

Waiting on the wet, 2024 © T W Baker

Jennie Groom’s Lola in utero, 2024 is a very different image of pregnancy. Indeed, a most unusual portrait. It is both clever and effective, a fine monochrome study.

Lola in utero, 2024 © Jennie Groom

 

Laura Zviedre’s Hands, 2024 is a delightful portrayal of a child - one of his hands holding his parents’ hands whilst his other one rests on his mother’s growing belly. It is all about love.

Hands, 2024 © Laura Zviedre

Back in 1995, Raoul Slater and his father Peter produced a lavishly illustrated book, Photographing Australia's Birds. More recently, he has been working in the medium of wet plate collodion, the pre-eminent photographic technology of the 1860s. His selected finalist work Muni, 2024 is a fine example of that medium.

Muni, 2024 - Raoul Slater

There are two other artworks that I found myself studying for lengthy periods of time. Michael Cook’s Individuation – Persona 2024 and Dida Sundet’s Philomela 2024. Cook’s works interrogate the legacy of colonisation and invite viewers to experience roles in reversal and histories re-written. This particular artwork ponders his life and that of his friend and artistic collaborator, Joey Gala. It recreates a scene from Greco-Roman mythology that depicts rape and is my favourite work in the exhibition. Through feminist intervention, it “alters perspective and challenges established gendered tropes.” Again, there is so much to see – movement in the woman’s arms, cyanotypes in the fabric, a toy held by a hand under the food-laden structure, and much more.

Individuation - Persona, 2024 © Michael Cook

Philomela, 2024 © Dida Sundet

Overall, this is a splendid exhibition, perhaps the best selection of finalists yet in this annual major Prize. Whilst we do not know what other works were amongst the thousands not selected (except for our own if we entered), the judges are to be commended for their 48 choices – all of which can be seen online here.

A longer review is available on the author's blog here and in the December 25 issue of The Printer (pp 16-22) here.

Share this:

The Fold : Hoda Afshar

Photography Book Review: Brian Rope

The Fold : Hoda Afshar

Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon & Hoda Afshar

Designed and Published by Loose Joints Studio

Oversized stitched booklet with quadruple-folded debossed cover

245 x 245mm, 228 pp, 435 monotone plates

ISBN: 978-1-912719-64-8

Hoda Afshar began her career as a documentary photographer in Iran. Since 2007 she has been an Australia-based visual artist and documentary maker. She has won various major awards, including Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize twice.

Afshar is a member of Eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers uniquely straddling contemporary art, academia and grass roots community engagement. Considered to be a most innovative visual artist of her generation, she explores marginality, gender representation, and displacement.

Afshar challenges the history of gazes. The gaze (French: le regard), in the figurative sense, is an awareness and perception of others or oneself. In this book, The Fold, she pushes the boundaries of photography, making it a potent instrument of disclosure and resistance. It is both poetic and committed.

Cover_The Fold

In addition to the book, the artist’s first monographic exhibition – opening on 30 September 2025 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, France - Hoda Afshar. Performer the Invisible also unveils The Fold.

Performer l'invisible

The book – and, I understand, the exhibition - offers a critical re-reading of photographs from the museum's collections’ archives, taken by the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan de Clérambault during a stay in Morocco in 1918-19. He attempted to investigate his psychoanalytic theories regarding fantasy and facial coverings, producing thousands of photographs of Islamic women, and some males, wearing the traditional white Haik garment of the area, which has now virtually vanished from everyday life there due to colonialism.

By exploring and re-appropriating that image archive, Afshar has questioned the way in which photography, used by dominant powers, has shaped - sometimes made captive – how bodies are represented. The Fold attempts to unpack de Clérambault’s ideas about fabrics, covering, and fetishism.

When she commenced scanning the archive, Afshar found herself unintentionally creating small square images of folded fabric and hidden faces, purely selected by chance. She decided to continue doing so, as a way of referencing the repetition, excess, and obsession with the fold – the very qualities of the Baroque period described by Gilles Deleuze in his 1988 book, also titled The Fold. He was a key figure in poststructuralism and, in that book, proposed a new and radical way of understanding philosophy and art. He introduced a way of practising philosophy that centres on the fold, exploring how difference turns inward to engage with itself.

This is the first time Afshar has drawn upon an archive in her work. Through the recurring motif of a mirror, we are invited to examine our own biases as we view these images, particularly in relation to the veil. 

There are around 24 pages of text in the 122 pages of the book. They primarily comprise two essays - “On Photography and Orientalism” by Ali Behdad, and “Decoding Clerambault – Hoda Afshar’s Unfinished Quest” by Annabelle Lacour, plus a conversation between Afshar and photography historian Taous Dahmani. One brief exchange from that conversation focuses on the key issue of why the women in the image archive are not identified.

Dahmani asks Is their fate to be ever-linked with their photographer’s name? Afshar responds Yes, this is a difficult question to answer and the same one I had in making The Fold – the question of who is missing in this work. On the one hand this is obvious; the women who figure in Clerambault’s photographs. As in so many of the photographs taken in this same milieu, the photographed women are silent; we learn nothing about them.

The bulk of the book is images created by Afshar’s scanning of the Deleuze archive. Here is my small random selection of the image pages.

 

And here are a few individual images provided to the media for use:

Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press05

Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press11

Hoda_Afshar_TheFold_Press15

Afshar has also created a film which begins with a digital animation re-imagining the scene of de Clérambault’s death – he shot himself in front of a mirror. A camera focusing on his reflected image leads into a sequence in which clinicians and academics offer their assessment of him. An excerpt worth viewing is here.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.

​