Shea Kirk has won the 2023 National Photographic Portrait Prize with a picture of friend and fellow artist Emma Armstrong-Porter.
The winning picture, titled Ruby (left view), is a black and white image of a topless Armstrong-Porter, and it's half of a stereoscopic pair - two photographs taken at the same time from different angles.
Kirk said he teared up and struggled to find words after he discovered he'd won.
"I'm past that, but it's still sinking in," he told AAP.
The portrait was taken the day the artists first met, with Kirk wanting to explore the idea of the human body as a record.
"We are our faces as much as we are our limbs, extremities, our nooks and crannies," he said.
The pair are now good friends and Armstrong-Porter says the portrait reflects their changing attitude to their body.
“I’ve always struggled with the size of my body, from being extremely underweight to now being overweight," they said.
Making portraits with Kirk had helped process these changes.
"I’m starting to feel more at home in my big queer body,” Armstrong-Porter said.
The $30,000 prize was awarded at the National Portrait Gallery on Friday. It comes with $20,000 worth of Canon photography equipment.
The judges said the winning portrait was apparently effortless but was in fact a masterful and technically complex work in which the sitter had no self-consciousness.
The image is part of an ongoing series Kirk calls Vantages, in which he makes portraits of people at his shopfront studio in Melbourne using old photographic technology.
Working with a dual large format rig he put together himself, Kirk captures two perspectives simultaneously on individual sheets of black and white film.
The result is left and right views of the subject - a portrait that has not been reduced to a single vantage point.
It's a painstaking process involving loading cut sheets of film, manually setting the focus and aperture, and tensioning the springs of the shutters.
Then Kirk can step away from his equipment to engage directly with his sitter, rebalancing the power dynamic between artist and subject.
"I'm actually able to stand beside the camera and share that moment with the person that I'm working with," he said.
It's a repetitive process, with shoots lasting anywhere from three to nine hours.
The sheets are developed in Kirk's small darkroom, a process the artist says is magical no matter how many times he does it.
Armstrong-Porter was also a finalist in the prize with another black and white portrait titled Sisters or Friends, 2022.
The two artists are exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery and their work is also featured in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria.
The judges selected 47 finalists from a pool of almost 2400 entries.
The National Photographic Portrait Prize opens on Saturday at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
