Won the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2025
- Sep 19, 2025
- 2 min read
I received a call from the National Portrait Gallery informing me that I had won this year’s National Portrait Prize on the morning of my birthday last week.
It was an emotional moment, coming exactly ten years after I first received the same award in 2015. I couldn’t hold back my tears, though not only from joy or excitement. I had not intended to enter the prize again–and I certainly never expected to win it. I submitted this work, hoping it might be selected as one of the finalists, in order to draw public attention to the ongoing crisis facing Indigenous children in youth detention across Australia.
The image is part of a larger project titled Code Black/Riot. “Code Black” is the emergency code used in youth detention to indicate a riot. I’ve been developing this project in far North Queensland since November last year in collaboration with the indigenous artist, Vernon Ah Kee, and my old friend and collaborator, Behrouz Boochani, with the support of Change the Record in Sydney and Youth Empowered Towards Independence (YETI) in Cairns. The project is made up of several components and is an interrogation of a system that targets and incarcerates children as young as ten years old, like the three girls in this portrait.
First Nations children aged 10 to 17 make up only 6.6% of their age group in the general population, yet they are 29 times more likely to be imprisoned. Three in five children behind bars are First Nations, and two in three have a diagnosed mental illness. The children I’ve worked with are among the most vulnerable in this country. They experience disadvantage, discrimination and incarceration from an early age. They need love, care, and community, but instead, they’re criminalized and punished.
The system is broken. Detention centers and watchhouses are not places of healing—they are sites of trauma, abuse, and systemic failure. We know this, but our society has come to accept a certain picture of itself—a hierarchised image in which some forms of violence are seen as tolerable or normal.
As a photographer, I am always seeking to disrupt such ways of seeing, and this is why I chose to submit this portrait for the NPPP. For me, these girls’ gesture symbolizes an act of resistance both against authority and towards the camera—a refusal to be, or to be seen, as passive.
We need to see differently if things are going to change.
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