Andrew Cowen

My name is Andrew Cowen. I won the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2014, which was a portrait of a friend of mine, whose name's Matthew Martin.

I've been doing this a little while now, and you know, I've only become more interested in the things that you can think about, and achieve, and explore by making pictures. There's still plenty of legs in a decent portrait, a strong portrait.

Matthew Martin is a friend of mine. He's a really lovely guy, and he came to visit me in the studio one day, where we are right now. And we were having a conversation. While that was happening I made a series of pictures of him. There were, you know, a few good ones in there, and there was that one in particular which was just a very strong picture.

Winning that prize is a pretty big thing in Australia because that kinda has a great profile that has, you know. It's this recognition that the work that you're making is actually kind of at a pretty high level. You know, it's winning that prize, validates that mode of work that you're doing, and it enables you, it gives you a little bit of freedom to continue down that road. Making things... costs money. And generally speaking, you're not, you don't make that money back ever, even if you sell work, or if you make a book, and you sell books. You know, your motivation is not to make money it's just you want to make something so that the money in that, the prize money in that certainly helps in that regard. I mean, always have, nice to have a little cash injection like that. Who doesn't want that? Got spent pretty quick that's for sure.

The advice I would give to someone who was thinking about entering the prize but they weren't confident about it would just be to do it. You have to strive in what you're doing. And by, even by entering the prize, even if you're just sending something by email, you're thinking about is this work up to scratch? If not, what can I do to make it better or more powerful or whatever it needs to be to be hitting that note. That in itself is a, a process of learning. And even if that's the only thing you learned by entering that prize, it would be worth doing. Winning $25,000 is pretty cool, too.