- What a great turnout, thank you for being here. I'd personally like to welcome you all to the National Portrait Gallery here today, and I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Ngambri and the Ngunnawal peoples. Hello, I'm Karen Quinlan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. This is the 13th year of the National Photographic Portrait Prize. We were very excited to receive over 2,500 entries this year. We are proud to present this beautiful exhibition of the 48 finalists. The winner of the National Photographic Portrait Prize this year will be awarded over $50,000 in prizes, including $30,000 in cash from the Portrait Gallery, plus a range of the latest photographic equipment from Canon, valued at $22,000. The highly commended photographer will receive an Eizo ColorEdge 27-inch monitor, valued at over $3,000. The photographer who receives the most votes in the People's Choice Award will receive a prize of fine art printing to the value of $2,200, thanks to Sun Studios. Exhibitions like this are made possible thanks to the generous support of our partners. For this exhibition, we are also grateful for the support of Midnight Hotel, the Autograph Collection, Canberra. Now, for the very exciting moment. The winner of the 2020 NPPP highly commended prize is awarded to Hugh Stewart for his portrait of 105-year-old dancer Eileen Kramer. It is my great pleasure to let you know that the winner of the 2020 National Photographic Portrait Prize is Rob Palmer for his portrait of Chef Josh Niland, titled "The Mahi-Mahi." Congratulations. Thank you.
- Rob, congratulations on winning the National Photographic Portrait Prize.
- Thank you so much, Gill. Thank you so much.
- Can you tell us a little bit about this amazing portrait?
- This is a picture of Josh Niland who is the chef and owner of Saint Peter restaurant in Sydney. Josh does a lot of amazing stuff with fish at the moment. It's earned him a lot of accolades around the world. But one of his big things is using all of the fish, so he's aiming towards zero waste. All the parts of the fish are used in his cooking. Traditionally, western cultures like to avoid eyes and bones and scales. The lot goes into Josh's cooking.
- Did you just wake up one morning and think, "I need to take a portrait of Josh"? How did the actual sitting come about?
- Well, Josh and I have been working together last year on a book that he's done. He's done his first cookbook. So we've been working together over a period of a week or two. This was just a moment that's during that shoot that presented itself where Josh pulled out this massive mahi-mahi and he just had this sort of, I mean, he has so much respect for the food and the fish he works with, and it's just this almost intimate moment between him and his fish.
- Did you have to set up the composition much at all or is this all pretty, was there any sort of artificial lighting that you needed, or is it all fairly natural?
- This is just shot with one light. I was saying earlier that you, some shots you kinda gotta fight for to compose them and get the subject right and light them. This is one of those shots that presented itself, and it was almost my job to just document that without putting too much of my thumbprint on it. So it's just very basic lighting.
- Fabulous. And there was a kind of an entertaining moment earlier at the announcement where it suddenly dawned on you what you'd actually won.
- Yes, I had. You sort of enter these amazing competitions and I don't enter them very often, and you don't ever expect to win them. So I'd always dreamt of being involved with something with the National Portrait Gallery, but I never expected to win, so I hadn't really read all of the rewards. And so when it got read out before us, like, wow, there's some amazing prize involved in this, too.
- Well, congratulations. And thanks so much for sharing this amazing portrait with us and with everybody in Australia. Congratulations.
- Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm stoked.
