Anna Higgins wins 2025 Bowness Photography Prize

Artist Anna Higgins has won the 2025 Bowness Photography Prize for her work Two horizons, a composite image combining analogue and digital techniques to depict the Victorian Alps.

Higgins receives $50,000, and her work will be acquired by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh).

Higgins said the work was made “intuitively, through experimentation both in the studio and with analogue film cameras.”

It consists of two frames from a 16 mm film forming a mirrored diptych, layered with in-camera double exposures and repeated white screenprints using freeze-frames from 8 mm film.

The imagery draws on observations of light and atmosphere in the Australian landscape, shot during a 2024 visit to the Victorian Alps and from archival film scans.

The judging panel—artist and 2023 Bowness winner Anne Zahalka, National Gallery of Australia photography curator Shaune Lakin, and MAPh director Anouska Phizacklea—selected Higgins from 50 finalists.

Two honourable mentions were awarded: James Tylor for Tapa-arra through the landscape 1, 4, 5 and Sarah Rhodes for Chamber of projection I, each receiving $2,500. The prize season also includes the Wai Tang Commissioning Award ($10,000 and an exhibition) and the $5,000 People’s Choice Award, with winners to be announced in November.