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Last week's opening of the National Photographic Portrait Prize was cancelled amid fears of spreading coronavirus, but you can see some of the amazing pictures here — including winner Rob Palmer's portrait.
- Sydney photographer Rob Palmer won this year's national photographic portrait prize
- His image portrays chef Josh Niland's passion for 'zero waste' cooking — using the whole fish
- The National Portrait Gallery says it will stay open during the coronavirus epidemic and is displaying the 48 finalists' works
The Sydney photographer's efforts to capture a chef's passion for his work won him the $50,000 prize, which National Portrait Gallery director Karen Quinlan announced online instead of in front of the expected crowd of finalists and guests.
Palmer shot the portrait of chef Josh Niland with a dolphinfish last year, and it was one of about 2,500 submissions to the lucrative annual competition.
He said he had struck luck with the image's composition — he was trying to capture Niland in his element and it proved relatively simple.
"You enter these amazing competitions — and I don't enter them very often — and you don't ever expect to win them," Palmer said.
"There are times you've got to fight to get an image, you need to craft it, you need to think about what's going to go on and work very hard at it.
"But there are images like this which just sort of present themselves."
He said his aim was to convey the chef's passion for working with the whole fish, from fin to tail.
"Zero waste is his big thing — using every part of the fish — and that is what really inspired the image," he said.
Palmer had been working with Niland on a cookbook for more than a week before the right moment presented itself.
"Josh pulled out this massive mahi-mahi [dolphinfish]… He just has so much respect for the food and the fish he works with," Palmer said.
"It's just this almost intimate moment between him and his fish."
The judges praised Palmer's finesse; one of them, Nici Cumpston, said the work embodied "the feeling that the chef has for the fish".
Meanwhile, Hugh Stewart's portrait of 105-year-old dancer Eileen Kramer was highly commended among the 47 other finalists that are on display at the gallery.
Kramer moved back to Australia from New York when she was 98, because she wanted to hear a kookaburra laugh. She turns 105 this year.
And, although the exhibition's official launch was cancelled, the National Portrait Gallery is one of several galleries and museums in Canberra that have chosen to remain open to the public — although public programs and events like the launch have been cancelled.
The photographic portraits will be on display until May, before travelling to other venues around the country.
Here's a snapshot of what can be viewed at the gallery:
Topics: photography, arts-and-entertainment, visual-art, fine-art-photography, library-museum-and-gallery, canberra-2600, act
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