Congratulations to Shea Kirk, who has won the 2023 National Photographic Portrait Prize for his portrait Ruby (left view), of friend and fellow-artist Emma Armstrong-Porter.
Ruby (left view) is part of an ongoing series, Vantages, in which Kirk invites people to be photographed in the setting of his home studio. Of the piece, he says, “I wanted to create the idea of the body as a record. We are our faces as much as we are our limbs, extremities, our nooks and crannies. The self and sense of a person in a portrait for me is often thought of more than just a face and hands, it’s an essence of the whole.”
The prize, which was created in 2007, was this year judged by: Australian photographer Tamara Dean; Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Photography, Daniel Boetker-Smith; and National Portrait Gallery Senior Curator Joanna Gilmour.
The winning entry was chosen amongst 47 finalists from over 2,300 entries, with the judges saying, “While Shea makes the portrait look effortless, this is a masterful and technically complex work where the sitter has no self-consciousness. It is as if the artist and sitter are participating equally in the transaction.”
Kirk has won $30,000 cash from the National Portrait Gallery, and $20,000 worth of photography equipment from Canon Australia.
The award-winning work, and all finalist works, are now showing at the National Portrait Gallery.
National Photographic Portrait Prize 2023
National Portrait Gallery
17 June—2 October
Suggested Reading
The rhythm of creating
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Sally Gearon
The ecstatic visions of Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
Michael Sun
Scaling new heights
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Michelle Wang
Trevor Vickers and the abstraction of light
Trevor Vickers reflects on his six-decade career in hard-edged abstraction, the value that Perth’s light offers painters, and how his latest exhibition at Art Collective WA focuses on a series of quieter works.
Steve Dow
AI-Generated Art? Bring it on!
Artists need not fear the spectre of AI-generated art. Instead, Oslo Davis suggests, we need to start reaping the rewards.
Oslo Davis
Rob McHaffie hones in on homelife
Melbourne-born figurative artist and ceramicist Rob McHaffie takes a global view of human idiosyncrasy. His biggest exhibition to date, now showing at Bendigo Art Gallery, covers over a decade of his painting practice.