Gamekeeper with shot foxes

I managed to get one of the six ‘Highly Commended’ awards in the Fremantle Portrait Prize 2012, which has ambitions to be as prestigious as the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize run by the National Gallery in the UK. There were nearly 700 entries from 22 countries for this inaugrual competition and I was one of three people not from Australia to make the top ten. I knew last month that I’d made it to the last 65 which would be printed and displayed in the Moores Building, which is a contemporary Art Gallery in central Freemantle, Western Australia, but they waited until the opening of the exhibition to announce the winners.

Izzy on the Moor

After 2013 the Freemantle Portrait Prize became a bi-annual competition. I entered in 2015, but never made it beyond the long list, which is the top 30% of entries. However, when the advert for the 2017 competition came out I found one of my photos on the front cover (above) and another as a full page advert on the back cover. 

Matty at Home

In 2017 I returned back to form and made it to the final. The photo above of Matty sitting in his front room was exhibited at the Moores Gallery in Freemantle, Australia. I had also entered this image into the National Gallery's Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize unsuccessfully. There is a sister competition called the Portrait Salon that takes the rejected photos from the Taylor Wessing and forms it's own exhibition made up of the best of the rejects. This image was accepted  and was one of 50 exhibited around Clerkenwell, London in 2016.

You can see the other exhibited entries here.  Portrait Salon 2016