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National Photographic Portrait Prize 2020

The exhibition is selected from a national field of entries, reflecting the distinctive vision of Australia's aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects.

Graham Kennedy and the Seekers in Melbourne, c. 1968

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2007

Sideshow Alley

Death masks, post-mortem drawings and other spooky and disquieting portraits... Come and see how portraits of infamous Australians were used in the 19th century.

The National Portrait Prizes

The National Portrait Gallery today announced finalists for the inaugural Darling Portrait Prize, a national new $75,000 prize for Australian portrait painting, and released selected images from the final prize pool for the popular National Photography Portrait Prize.

Strutt your stuff

Matthew Jones on the upshot of a St Kilda Road outrage.

Audacity, audacity, audacity

Angus delves into the biographies of two ambitious characters; Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir John Pope-Hennessy.

Giving and getting

The exhibition Portraits for Posterity celebrates gifts to the Gallery, of purchases made with donated funds, and testifies to the generosity and community spirit of Australians.

Paper, boy

Peter Wilmoth’s boy-journalist toolkit for antagonising an Australian political giant.

Terms and conditions

These terms and conditions govern entries to the National Portrait Gallery’s Darling Portrait Prize 2024.

The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush

Some years ago my colleague Andrea Wolk Rager and I spent several days in the darkened basement of a Rothschild Bank, inspecting every one of the nearly 700 autochromes created immediately before World War I by the youthful Lionel de Rothschild.

Of ice and men

Frank Hurley's celebrated images document the heroism and minutiae of Australian exploration in Antarctica.

The art of conciliation

Gareth Knapman explores the politics and opportunism behind the portraits of Tasmania’s Black War.

The importance of being bearded

Joanna Gilmour discovers that the beards of the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills were as epic as their expedition to traverse Australia from south to north.

In a good paddock

Celebrating a new painted portrait of Joseph Banks, Sarah Engledow spins a yarn of the naturalist, the first kangaroo in France and Don, a Spanish ram.

Terms and conditions