Bowness Photography Prize 2026
- Tamara Dean , Murray Fredericks
- 18 Sep 2026—8 Nov 2025
- Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)
Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin is thrilled to congratulate Tamara Dean on being awarded the 2026 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize for her work Metamorphosis. Dean received Australia’s most significant honour for photography – and its $50,000 prize – at last night’s awards ceremony at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), where Metamorphosis will now enter the permanent collection and is on view in this year’s Bowness Prize exhibition until 8 November.
“Metamorphosis reflects my fascination with transformation in nature and our place as humans within cycles of growth, decay and renewal,” says Dean. “Using my own body as the subject, I imagined myself unfurling like a flower opening towards light, emerging from a luminous yellow form. Having recently turned 50, I have been reflecting on ageing as another stage of becoming. Alongside a deeper awareness of impermanence remains a profound gratitude simply to be alive. Created alone in my purpose-built underwater studio, this was one of the most personally challenging works I have made.”
Dean was selected from 50 finalists drawn from more than 750 entries as the recipient of Australian contemporary photography’s ultimate accolade by a judging panel comprising photographer and Bowness Prize winner Petrina Hicks, NGV Senior Curator of Photography Natasha Bullock and MAPh Director Anouska Phizacklea. Of Metamorphosis, the judges say: “Tamara Dean’s photograph is operatic and poetic: an opus that is the culmination of a sustained body of work, evident not only in its conception and process but also in its exquisite execution and presentation.”
Recently previewed by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin at Sydney Contemporary, Metamorphosis forms part of Dean’s forthcoming series, The Garden, which will debut in its entirety with the opening of her next solo exhibition at Michael Reid Sydney in January 2027. Please join us in congratulating Tamara Dean on her extraordinary achievement. This defining triumph adds to a growing list of accolades for The Garden, with works from the same series also shortlisted for the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize and the Blake Prize.
To discuss Dean’s work with a gallery representative or sign up for previews and priority access to The Garden, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au
Tamara Dean’s prize-winning work is joined in this year’s Bowness Prize exhibition by that of her fellow finalist and Michael Reid stablemate Murray Fredericks, who is shortlisted for Dog Fence, Solitary Posts from his series Dog Fence (2018–2026). Dog Fence, Solitary Posts will also be on view at Michael Reid Sydney in two weeks with the opening of the acclaimed artist and filmmaker’s first solo exhibition since the announcement of his representation by the gallery earlier this year.
“The Dog Fence is the longest continuous humanmade structure in the world,” says Fredericks, whose project traces approximately 1,500 kilometres of the fence through a simple methodology: a photograph made every 300 metres. “Conceived as a survey of place, the work instead became an investigation of the fence’s structures and their interaction with the landscape.”
Opening Thursday, 1 October, Fredericks’s inaugural Michael Reid Sydney exhibition will bring together key photographs from his seminal, decades-spanning Salt project alongside more recent images from Blaze and Dog Fence. Unfolding across the entire ground floor of our Chippendale gallery, this expansive presentation will connect the visual and conceptual threads of a globally acclaimed practice shaped by prolonged solitary immersion in remote environments at the far edges of elemental extremes. Incorporating excerpts from Fredericks’s documentary films alongside several of his most compelling and indelible images, this large-scale survey will offer a comprehensive view of his ongoing inquiry into light, space and duration.
“Rather than treating landscape as scenery, I understood it as a field in which perception unfolds, where light, space and duration become the true subject,” says Fredericks, who has spent more than three decades honing a singular photographic language grounded in reduction, seriality and sustained attention. Approaching remote, often forbidding environments not as sites of spectacle or endurance, Fredericks instead views them as conditions through which his reductionist compositions might move beyond the “surface exotic” towards a sustained engagement with light, space and temporality.
The artist’s Eora/Sydney exhibition coincides with another major presentation of his work, as his institutional survey The salt lake continues its cross-country tour with an expansive, career-spanning presentation at Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour. Curated by MAPh Senior Curator Angela Connor, the exhibition brings together still and moving images from Salt, Array, Vanity and Blaze, tracing the emotional and metaphysical dimensions of Fredericks’s sustained encounters with landscape.
To sign up for previews and priority access to works slated to feature in these two concurrent shows, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au
