National Photography Prize 2024

Alex Walker and Daniel O’Toole’s practices reside at the intersection of analogue and digital processes. Building on a common interest in natural phenomena and the properties of light, this installation works with analogue modes of image manipulation and abstraction derived from the visual language of lenses.

Anti-lens presents a series of experiments and their outcomes which re-imagine the lens as a tool for degrading and distorting the recognisable rather than focusing and clarifying an image.

In these experiments the artists employ synthetic materials, architecture, and mirrors to alter light waves and create a series of light-based experiences within the space. Walker and O’Toole have used industrial methods of fabricating and finishing to create objects that illustrate the visual language of lenses.

The series Joy is an ode to 'The Joy of Photography’ – a popular guidebook for beginners, published by Eastman Kodak Company in 1979. Through various modes of appropriation, Ali McCann attempts to recreate images which once provided her with a respite from the tedium of her formal education.

Part adolescent fantasy, part sentimental gesture to the photographic medium, the suite of almost hallucinatory images has taken shape as if through the mind of the artist’s teenage self.

Inspired by recurring imagery, motifs, and romantic tropes from ‘The Joy of Photography’, McCann constructed makeshift, alter-like sets in the studio using found and custom-made objects and backdrops. Using an old studio camera from the mid-1970s, the works were then captured on film in a single frame utilising special lighting effects and filters.

IMPOSSIBLE DESIRE consists of a video and a series of hand-painted photographs captured inside a public toilet in Ali Tahayori's hometown, Shiraz, where he had his first intimate experience as a teenager.

Unable to return to Iran to visit this place, Tahayori asked a friend to photograph the space as it is now. Looking at his friend's photographs, he realised they did not correlate with his memories of the site. The project initially aimed to revisit and reconstruct a past queer memory. Later, it became about the experience of a place and a time that was no longer accessible.

Tahayori used his own bodily fluid to express his feelings of loss and longing for a past that was disrupted and a future that never followed. His bodily fluid mixed with gouache paint aims to queer the image, reimagining a future where being queer is not shamed or penalised anywhere in the world.

Ellen Dahl works with landscape in a range of manners. In Four Days before Winter she explores the peripheral Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, known for its remoteness and stunning Arctic environment. It is also one of the fastest warming places on earth and has a long history of coal mining that is still occurring today.

Collapse is a close-up detail of terrain collapsing due to the melting permafrost. The large, suspended element brings focus to the inherent colossal ecological scale within this detail. Two Sides of the Same Place and Arctic Coal Diptych are from the Russian Svalbardian mining ghost town, Pyramiden. The black mountain and the nearby shrinking glacier lay bare the conflicting duality between coal mining in the Arctic and the profound impact of global warming on the area. Here/Now responds to a fleeting moment captured in the Arctic fog, revealing deep geological time at an edge of the world.

Courtesy of the artist and sweet pea, Perth

A Puzzlement draws from archival material with Thai provenance from various British cultural institutions, questioning how these collections might influence broader perceptions of ‘Thainess’. In this installation, Nathan Beard combines ethnographic and botanical imagery with publicity material for The King and I, which heavily dramatises an account of King Mongkut’s court as the kingdom adopted a period of modernisation to defend its sovereignty.

The subjects of these portraits include A.F.G Kerr, the so-called ’founding father’ of Thai botany; and Prince Chulalongkorn, whose portrait resides in the Wellcome Collection, UK. Also featured is a film production still of King Mongkut and a Broadway playbill portrait of his chief wife Lady Thiang, played by Yul Brynner and Terry Saunders, respectively.

Surrounded by Buddhist statues from the British Museum and imagery of Thai orchids from the Kew Gardens library, these portraits are hand-embellished with over 92,000 Swarovski Elements. The specific names of these crystal shades each contain Siam; an antiquated term for Thailand now commodified as a signifier of exotic beauty. The painted wallpaper draws from a mural in a shrine erected for the 2017 cremation ceremony of King Rama IX in Nakhon Nayok, the home province of the artist’s mother.

Through montage and juxtaposition, A Puzzlement suggests the porous and precarious nature of ‘Thainess’ as it sifts through a range of eras and references.

A Puzzlement has been supported by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, and PICA’s Art Commissioners.

Ioulia Panoutsopoulos weaves together photographic, drawing, and sculptural practices to embrace both the analogue and digital realms. Seeking to bring spatial propositions and light into dialogue with quantum and material inquiry, her works explore the expansion of perception and consciousness.

Collapsar is a series of new works that were made in the studio and on analogue film. Negatives were scanned and displayed on a monitor, with the final work constructed by shooting her monitor with an analogue camera. Embracing screen flare, hotspots and subtle banded pattern overlaying the screen, these works aim for an open expanded pictorial nervous system.

In the series Shadowing, Izabela Pluta critiques the aesthetic sensibilities of found images lifted from genre-specific Reader’s Digest publications, notably the 1980s ‘Scenic Wonders of the World’. The emergence of these publications can be attributed to a growing market of middle-class readers with the means and desire to travel internationally, as well as technological advances in photography, printing, publishing, and distribution. The compilation of images into coffee table books were an attempt to evoke the unique qualities of world locations. Ironically, such collations do the exact opposite, flattening difference and presenting a visual parade of postcard views, devoid of any context.

In Pluta’s collages, pages have been sliced and spliced into fragments where air, land and water converge. Violently abstracted, they disorientate and dislocate the geographies from which they are drawn. The collages have a three-dimensional quality, as sections of cut paper curl away from the support to reveal shadowing beneath.

Bounded in a Nutshell / King of Infinite Space began as a research project concerned with 19th century landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the ways in which both serve the settler colonialist agenda. Kai Wasikowski utilised 3D spatial software – technology typically used in architecture, mapping, and the natural sciences – to create photographic works at local conservation sites. This revealed a crude rendering of space: for a process that created so much data, there seemed to be an abundance, if not an equal measure, of blankness.

This project is part of the artist’s ongoing interest in how a critical approach to photography and environmental conservation might render visible (or invisible) the colonial logics that afforded settlers a sense of romantic communion with nature and sense of belonging.

Они/They is an ongoing photographic project that explores connections between time, relationships, and archival images. Olga Svyatova appropriates their own personal experience of differing cultures and histories to invite reflections on the connections that sustain all our lives. The subjects in these black and white photographs are the artist’s blood family from Russia and their chosen family and friends in so-called Australia.

Looking through family albums with their babushka, Svyatova found a likeness between an early photograph of their family, taken during an annual summer trip to Makhachkala in 1962, and a recent sending-off party that they hosted before a long awaited, post-pandemic trip to the motherland in 2022. They continued to notice more of these strange similarities between old family photographs taken before their birth and photographs they had personally taken decades later, mostly on their iPhone.

Они/They is a collection of candid moments, celebration, portraits, and silly times intentionally paired together to reveal notions of past and present connections that explore the intricacies of relationships across time and space.

Here’s what we know is sort of about driving and tourism and extraction and technology and fantasy. About setting out for very long walks, the visual identity of highways, and the vernacular of the plaques and carved stone that mark the way. About trying to make sense of it all. It’s a slide show of things we’ve seen, and things we think we know; about 21st century mobility and colonial place-making; ice-creams and tesla chargers; and living in this place, at this time, in this way.

Rebecca McCauley and Aaron Claringbold are based between the southwest and the southeast of Australia. As artists they are interested in the role of images in seeing and imagining the world and using photography as a tool for thinking and feeling a way through the “mess of now”.

The installation features a looping 35mm photographic slideshow with an accompanying sound work and narration, and two sculptures playing digital slideshows – a meditation on the experience and politics of ‘passing through’. Together, these elements speak to the vernacular of contemporary leisure, tourism, and car culture; situating them in the mess and conflict of lives lived within ongoing colonial extraction.

The artists acknowledge that Here's what we know was imaged and conceived across many locations within the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung, Whadjuk Nyoongar, Jinigudera, Yapurarra, Pindjarup, Nyaki Nyaki, Kalarko, Ngadju, Kaalamaya, Wongatha, Mirniny, Wirangu, Barngarla, Kokatha, Arabana, Arrernte, and Meintangk people. Sovereignty was never ceded.

This project was originally made possible through generous support from Yarra City Arts Annual Grants Program, and the City of Melbourne’s COVID-19 quick response grants. The artists thank Tristen Harwood for the generous conversations, Bonnie Cummings for the sound design, and Marcello Rotar for the headrest stand fabrication.

Chromatography is a photographic process invented in 1900 and commonly used by scientists to understand the chemical makeup of soil. Sammy Hawker has been testing the process’s capacity to facilitate the visual expression of a wide range of vibrant matter. Expectations must be set aside, as the hues and patterns that form as the solution spreads over the silver nitrate-soaked paper cannot be predetermined or controlled.

In Material Resonance [beyond the veil] the chromatograms speak to the memory inscribed within materials. A chromatogram made with drowned caterpillars found in a trough has the ethereal markings of a moth wing. A chromatogram made with a dehydrated placenta feels like life bursting forth out of an abyss. The artist also receives requests from those who wish to memorialise the lives of loved ones. This series is bookended by a chromatogram made with the ashes of a stillborn baby and a chromatogram made with soil from environmental philosopher Val Plumwood’s natural burial grave.

These chromatograms raise questions about a person’s ability to express themselves from beyond the veil. Disintegration can also be thought of as metamorphosis and sometimes it feels like the essence of a material (or being) is not necessarily tied to form. A notion as mysterious and effervescent as a chromatogram made with water from a sinkhole within the forest of takayna.

The artist acknowledges Caterpillars in Metamorphosis was created on Wiradjuri Country and Chromatogram of Val Plumwood’s grave was created on Walbunja Country. The artist has ongoing relationships with the custodians of these areas and permission to work with materials from Country. Beyond the Veil was created on palawa Country within takayna, lutruwita while the artist was visiting the site to create work for the Bob Brown Foundation. The personal chromatograms have been granted permission to be exhibited publicly.

Before Orange Peel, After Loose Teeth, Now Peanuts is a wall configuration complicating the idea of photographic capture. It mobilises assemblage, fragmentation, and remediation strategies to play with and against photographic containment. Skye Wagner’s suite of photographs reinterprets a sculptural assemblage originally built in Sydney from images, objects, food, and armature, and expanded on during a research residency in Rome.

Image genres like the still-life, product shot, instructional photograph, and food packet are enacted and recanted. Assembled images relating to bodies, handling and digestive processes are cut up and regenerated into associative and strange rhythms, resulting in an encounter that unsettles our understanding of what is being seen and felt.

The photographs play with digital language – cloning, liquifying, scaling – despite being straight photographs of 3D materials in physical space. Through the analogue construction and remediation of the assemblage, the photos confuse image with object and spatial distinctions. Wagner is interested in how assemblage, re-photography, and translation strategies can challenge ways of seeing and making sense.