Museum of Australian Photography: Bowness Photography Prize + Sarah Rhodes | The Inner Sky
Bowness Photography Prize 2026
The 50 shortlisted works in the 21st Bowness Photography Prize reveal the preoccupations and processes at work in contemporary Australian photographic practice. Installations intervene within the museum spaces; portraits offer intimacy. In the landscape, in the darkroom: these artists are reaching for new ways to convey the moment as they work with scale, technique, equipment and perspective. It’s an exciting and distinct field of artists.
Sarah Rhodes | The Inner Sky
Features works with photographic paper as a site of exchange.
At the centre of the exhibition is a figure shining a torchlight through a piece of translucent paper. The figure is neither fully concealed nor fully revealed. The shadow cast by the figure works like a photogram made in the darkroom. From this starting point, Rhodes experiments with paper to explore the different ways light conceals and reveals an image.
A projected video work expands this idea by inviting the viewer to imagine moving above and below the ground. The continual shift from the cave system to the expansive landscape above suggests the self cannot be sealed off but is formed in relation to the world around it.
