Head On Photo Awards 2025 Winners

INTERNATIONAL RUNNER UP

Viet Van – My mother after the storm

This photograph, taken in July 2025, captures my mother shortly after she returned home from a debilitating brain stroke. She is now entirely dependent, requiring diapers and nasogastric tube feeding. Most tragically, she has lost much of her memory, no longer recognising me. I understand these are likely her final years. I have dedicated myself to My Mother, a long-term photography project exploring her life. It comprises a photo book, a 37-minute documentary, and a solo exhibition at Greece’s Photometria Festival.

AUSTRALIAN RUNNER UP

Guy Templeton – The Leaving

Three years on from the 2022 floods – eighty homes, eighty departures. Each house pictured belonged to a Lismore family that accepted a government buyout to leave the floodplain permanently. Empty and silent, the buildings remain as placeholders of lives already in motion — a photograph of absence. The image explores the scale and quiet emotion of managed retreat in the face of climate impacts. Together, these homes become a single portrait of a town in transition, where the past still stands while the future is rebuilt elsewhere.

WINNER

Abdelrahman Alkahlout – Faith amidst genocide

A mass prayer by Palestinians in northern Gaza takes place amidst the ruins of a mosque destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. Surrounded by devastation, worshippers kneel side by side amongst the concrete remains of what was once a sacred space. This image captures a powerful moment of resilience and faith under the shadow of genocide. As homes, lives, and places of worship are erased, the act of collective prayer becomes both a symbol of spiritual defiance and a refusal to surrender identity, memory, and humanity.

Discover the other 30 photos selected as Finalists in this year’s Head On Exposure Awards

Finalists exhibition details

INTERNATIONAL RUNNER UP

Kelly Conlin – Refracted Horizons

High above Manhattan, visitors wander a mirrored observatory where skyline and self blur into one. The Empire State Building anchors the horizon, but inside, the city multiplies — fragmented, refracted, and reimagined — turning every glance into a kaleidoscope of modern life.

AUSTRALIAN RUNNER UP

Harald Helle – Central Coast LGA#04

This image is from my series on the Central Coast, where I use a view camera to explore the lesser-known parts of the coast.

Liam Man – Ring of fire and ice

A ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse reaches annularity as two ice climbers summit the Glacier Leones. A drone illuminates the ice’s textures and colours, battling fierce winds that whip up plumes of snow that burn in the sun’s rays. In the foreground, the ice is strewn with rocky debris, remnants of a landslide triggered upstream. As the glacier receded, its retreat destabilised the valley walls, making them prone to collapse. This initiated a self-perpetuating cycle with the debris darkening the ice, increasing infrared absorption and further accelerating the glacier’s melt.

Discover the other 40 photos selected as Finalists in this year’s Head On Landscape Awards.

Visit the exhibition

INTERNATIONAL RUNNER UP

Natascha Tahabsem – Witness, Gaza

He stood just past the Jordanian checkpoint, silent, in shock. One of four children evacuated from Gaza for cancer treatment, he had spent more than seven hours on the road. The bombing had already taken what should have been his hospital. Journalists and medics crowded the crossing. His face didn’t change. I made this image in the brief moment before he was moved to the helicopter. No one told me his name.

AUSTRALIAN RUNNER UP

Chrystal de Louise – Soft return

Holding her newborn and camera simultaneously, she authors her own origin story. This postpartum image is a feminist act – centring the maternal gaze, rejecting flattening narratives, and honouring the unseen labour of care.

This self-portrait completes a dyadic circle – mother and baby, mirror and moment. A visual meditation on embodied philosophy, it asks: What does it mean to come home to the self while mothering another?

WINNER

Lívia Peres – The world burns gently

He kept playing while the air thickened. I stayed quiet, watching him framed between bushes and smoke. It wasn’t the fire that moved me, it was his stillness inside it. I took the picture without thinking too much. Only later did I realise how often childhood continues, even when the sky shifts.

Discover the other 40 photos selected as Finalists in this year’s Head On Portrait Awards

Visit the exhibition

Mayor of Waverley Prize 2025

This year marks the inaugural Mayor of Waverley Prize, instigated by Mayor Will Nemesh, who invited Head On to include this special award within the Head On Photo Awards program. The prize recognises the Mayor’s selection for a single exhibition in the Festival.

Winner: Wanderland – Gavin Libotte (Australia)

Gavin uses his camera to shoot from street level, exposing new angles and hidden scenes overlooked by passersby.

Wanderland is on display along the Promenade at Bondi Beach during the Festival.

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