Congratulations to artist Anna Higgins, winner of the 2025 Bowness Photography Prize, for Two horizons, 2025. This composite image demonstrates technical mastery of both analogue and digital processes, where Higgins works with light and landscape to create an otherworldly experience of Victorian Alpine country.
With this image, Higgins aims to “challenge conventions of how the landscape is depicted in photography, foregrounding the ephemeral, abstract and painterly qualities of film and light.”
Anna Higgins, Two horizons, 2025, pigment inkjet prints, screenprint, varnish
175 × 125cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist
The judging panel – consisting of artist Anne Zahalka, Senior Curator Photography, National Gallery of Australia, Shaune Lakin and MAPh Director Anouska Phizacklea – from the field of fifty finalists, selected one winner, who receives $50,000 and their work acquired into MAPh’s collection, and two $2,500 honourable mentions.
“Higgins has dedicated her practice to experimentation and innovation with analogue and digital processes,” says Phizacklea. “Through her complex, conscious and painstaking processes, she brings a deep connection to the elements at play both within the photographic process and the world around her. Her deft manipulation of light and matter culminates in a transcendent expression of the Australian landscape, where a profound understanding of her medium renders the landscape at once painterly and ethereal.”
James Tylor, Tapa-arra through the landscape 1, 4, 5, 2024, from the series ‘Tapa-arra through the landscape’,
pigment inkjet prints, 50 × 55cm (each). Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist and N.Smith Gallery, Sydney
Sarah Rhodes, Chamber of projection I, 2025, from the series ‘Intimate immensity (after Bachelard)’, gelatin silver print, 125 × 100cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy the artist
The honourable mentions were awarded to James Tylor for his work Tapa-arra through the landscape 1, 4, 5, 2024 and Sarah Rhodes for her work Chamber of projection I, 2025.
Tylor’s image is a “strong depiction of historical Indigenous sites,” says Zahalka. “Now highways, these sites were once songlines, trade routes and paths for Aboriginal people that have been physically and graphically cut to expose the colonial scars left across the Australian landscape.”
Rhodes’ image “considers the cave as a metaphor for the subconscious – a space where inner states can be felt and externalised,” says the artist. “Inside a limestone cave, created using gelatin silver printing and hand-applied chemical processes, the photograph embraces surface marks as expressions of thought, memory and emotion. The pale stains invite the psychological to appear through the material. The branching forms – stalactites and tree roots penetrating the cavity – reflect the mutual influence between person and place.”
The artist selected for the Wai Tang Commissioning Award will receive $10,000 and the opportunity to exhibit a body of work throughout next year’s Bowness Photography Prize season. The People’s Choice winner will be awarded a cash prize of $5,000. Both recipients will be announced in November.
The 2025 Bowness Photography Prize finalist exhibition is showing at Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), Melbourne, from 13 September to 9 November.
