Now in its 18th year, the National Photographic Portrait Prize supports and celebrates photographic portraiture in Australia. Each year the prize attracts thousands of entrants from emerging and established artistic talent across the country. In 2025, the judges – writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law, Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery Serena Bentley, and Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia selected 48 finalists from a field of more than 1400 entries.
Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist and documentary maker, Hoda Afshar’s Untitled #01 (from the series Code Black/Riot) 2024 won the major award, with the judges describing her work as ‘a portrait of immense power, which creates an urgent conversation between viewer and subjects. While seemingly incidental, the relationship between the haphazard staging, blurred background and focus points in the foreground make for a bracing, brilliant photograph taken by an artist who truly knows her craft.’
The First Time Finalist was awarded to Sherry Quiambao, an Australian-Filipino multidisci-plinary artist based in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia for her portrait Mother dreams on a stone, 2024.
The judges commented on the work that, ‘Sherry Quiambao’s portrait is a work that is playful yet resilient. Full of unexpected surprises and contrasts, the artist depicts her mother under a golden emergency blanket resting her head on a stone. The artist uses a reduced colour palate and friction between surfaces to create a portrait that powerfully represents the ongoing trials, emergencies and triages of motherhood. This is a work that contrasts the legendary and the ordinary, the mythic and the domestic and speaks to both the necessity and impossible challenge of finding comfort in hard places.’
Featuring famous faces and everyday Australians, the prize celebrates the vitality and diversity of photographic portraiture in Australia and invites us into the intimate world of a subject/artist relationship and provides a powerful visual record of the year, reflecting a particular time in Australian culture, both socially and artistically.
This exhibition is supported by the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program, an Australian Government program aiming to improve access to the national collections for all Australians.
