GradFoto 2025 Gallery

Award Winner – Minh An Pham

Rồi một ngày con sẽ mất – Someday I will lose you, 2025

The GradFoto 2025 prize of $1,000 is awarded to graduate Minh An Pham from RMIT University for his series Rồi một ngày con sẽ mất – Someday I will lose you.

Daniella Zalcman said, ‘This work is so poignant and soulful — and I think relatable to anyone who has moved far from home. The visual voice is very strong here, giving us ethereal little glimpses into the photographer’s home and the tenderness he feels for his mother. I love the use of color and textile and the natural world, and the way that it feels like we’re drifting in and out of public and private scenes of familial life.’

In 2017, at the age of 15, I began studying abroad in Australia. With my immature thoughts at the time, I never imagined that life would take me so far from my family for so long. The project is my way of chronicling the life of my mom during the times I went back home. I have come to understand my mom more deeply, not only through the photographs but also through the time we spent together. I reflected on my family’s past, on our losses and pains, on my late father, and on the great sacrifices of a single mother who worked tirelessly to raise me and my brother alone.

Dear Mom, I hope you will always be healthy and stay by my side. I have only one wish: that we can be together for the rest of my life. In this life, I can never fully repay everything you have done for me, but I hope that in the next life, I will still be your child.

Highly Commended – Daniela Rodriguez

Echoes of Elsewhere, 2025

Daniella Zalcman said, ‘The notion of using photography as a tool for “resisting cultural erasure” is particularly powerful given photography’s origins as a colonial weapon: but Daniela’s work achieves this mission beautifully, through celebrations of food, dance, clothing, flora, and so many of the hallmarks of culture and identity.’

Echoes of Elsewhere explores the intersections of migration, memory, and cultural identity through photography, video, and installation. As a first-generation Chilean-Australian artist, I examine how belonging is formed and re-formed when cultural roots are displaced, and how image-making can serve as both resistance and remembrance.

The project began with a question: How can photography nurture a sense of belonging while resisting cultural erasure and assimilation? Growing up in 1980s Melbourne, I often felt the need to make myself invisible to avoid racist attention. Ralph Ellison’s words “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones” echo through this work as I seek to reverse that invisibility.

Drawing on feminist and transcultural frameworks, Echoes of Elsewhere examines how matriarchal memory, domestic space, and community sustain identity across displacement. Through still life, portraiture, and moving image, I reframe visibility not as exposure but as care—an ethical and relational encounter. Collaborating with family and community, the project transforms photography into a site of dialogue and continuity, reimagining diasporic identity as an act of tenderness, resistance, and becoming.

Highly Commended – Michaela Ottone

Thank you for letting me be myself, 2025

Daniella Zalcman said, ‘This project honors one of the most universal applications of photography—documenting our loved ones. Michaela’s work feels like an elevated scrapbook—combining beautiful, cinematic moments with friends with handwritten notes and elements of collage. It’s a lovely tribute to notions of community and chosen family.’

Being diagnosed Autistic/ADHD prompted me to reflect on the key supports are in my life, one of them being the group of people in these images. Despite often feeling isolated (a frequent experience of neurodivergence), I am fortunate enough to have an incredible network of friends and family. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be here today.

Part love letter to my community, part reminder that we are often less alone than we think, the photobook Thank you for letting me be myself celebrates friendship, neurodiversity, and reclaiming space. I made digital collages with text responses from those I have photographed over the last 14 years. I wanted to give them a chance to contribute to the work, provide a space for them to have more agency over their image, and disrupt the inherent power dynamic between photographers and their sitters. I used collage to create visual overwhelm for viewers, which speaks to the sensory overwhelm that I experience because of my neurodivergence. The collages sit amongst newer images without text, and landscape images with texts of my personal narrative. I hope the work challenges preconceived ideas around neurodivergence, provokes important conversations, and shows there is no singular experience.

Chelsea Wong

Taking Shape, 2025

This series of 15 photographs documents a site-specific performance staged within liminal spaces. In each location, light poured through cracks or openings in the structure. There was an attempt to contain the light by tracing its edge using stones or small objects gathered from the site. As one outline was complete, the light had already shifted. Consequently the objects had to be repositioned either following the edge of the light or anticipating its next location in an attempt to ‘trap’ the light.

This futile gesture becomes a metaphor for the instability of existence within liminal spaces. Just as the light continually escapes containment, so too does the individual shift in and out of legibility within institutional systems – where identity is subject to erasure, redefinition or invisibility. The work reflects on the experience of those who exist in social or legal limbo: individuals who physically exist yet are rendered invisible within bureaucratic records and systems of governance. These individuals include the gender queer, the homeless, and tourists. Etc. Like the fleeting patch of light, these individuals appear, disappear, and reappear in contested or non-sanctioned spaces.

Hà Huyền Trang

Trăm Năm Hạnh Phúc (The Most Genuine Thing), 2025

Their gazes catch her yellow skin before she is known
Her long black hair speaks before her story is heard

Trăm Năm Hạnh Phúc (The Most Genuine Thing) examines the social stigmas attached to Vietnamese women in transnational marriages. It explores how these women are framed through a narrow lens of desire, obscuring the complex realities of love, migration, and self-making that shape their choices. Adopting photography’s inherent potential to tell the truth as well as constructing it, the project interrogates the irony in the bureaucratic rituals of the partner visa application process.

Trăm Năm Hạnh Phúc (The Most Genuine Thing) investigates perceptual-affective dimensions through the uses of materials to render visible the experiences of social prejudices confronting Vietnamese women in transnational marriages. The work brings together portraits of women printed on chiffon and a passport-sized photobook resembling a wedding invitation, in which three interwoven stories of marriage unfold across its pages. The fabric portraiture becomes an extension of the racialised female body, directly interrogating the way these women are perceived.

Trăm Năm Hạnh Phúc (The Most Genuine Thing) opens up conversations around migration, gender and race, questioning the racialised structures that shape women of colour’s lives.

Joel Potter

por/trait, 2025

por/trait is a photographic series that asks if identity can be represented without showing any human form. The work began as an attempt to understand the limits of portraiture and the discomfort I’ve always felt with my own self-image, as well as a way to counteract the performance of a traditional portrait. Instead of photographing people directly, I looked to collections of objects, spaces, traits, and traces that live around them, and treating these as extensions of the self.

The series was shaped through cycles of photographing, reflecting, and editing. I used two categories of images: “worldbuilding” images that set the scene of the subject’s life, and “deeper connection” images that have emotion, atmosphere, and more interpretive contexts. Together, they form portraits that sit in between presence and absence.

Throughout the process, I realised that every choice I made, like the lens, framing, colour, and sequencing, was filtering the identity being shown. The portraits created friction between the subject’s world and my interpretation of it. This tension became the structure of the work rather than a flaw. por/trait proposes that identity can be felt in what people leave behind, what they hold close, and what remains after they move through a space. It offers a portrait formed through evidence instead of appearance.

Martha Bizimana

I am all of them, 2025

My work explores the layered experience of migration, memory, and identity, and how the body carries both the traces of ancestry and the negotiations of belonging in new landscapes. The repeated figures in my photographs speak to the multiplicity of self the many versions of who we are, who we have been, and who we are becoming. In these foreign lands, identity is not fixed but continuously reshaped. Yet within this process of becoming, we carry the DNA of those who came before us, the memory of their journeys folded into our own. Each step through these architectural spaces is an act of inhabiting history and forging a new one. The structures of the city, with their rigid lines and monumental presence, become stages upon which the body asserts its presence, holding space for ancestral echoes.

The work suggests that identity is both inherited and constructed carried like memory within the body, but also reconfigured by encounters with new places. To migrate is to live in this in-between space: at once foreign and familiar, fractured, and whole, haunted by what came before yet moving toward what is still unfolding. Through repetition and placement, I explore how the self persists across time, how memory inhabits the present, and how belonging emerges in the fold between past and future.

Sabrina Trombini

The Balanced Diet, 2025

I have created a series of still life images that explore balance, colour, and composition through the use of fruits and vegetables. By selecting produce with either complementary or harmonising colour palettes, I aim to explore the visual relationships between form, texture, and tone. This project brings together my love for creativity and food, giving me the chance to express both my technical and artistic sides. It’s also a way for me to challenge myself, step outside my comfort zone, and create a body of work that reflects my growth as an artist while building my professional portfolio.

Victoria Rowse

Detestable Decibels, 2025

Detestable Decibels explores how photography can change our perception of negative sounds. It focuses on cymatics (the visualisation of sound waves) and specifically examines sounds that people find uncomfortable. Unlike typical cymatics projects that use calming sounds, this project delves into more distressing audio to reveal the beauty beneath. Through my research on sound waves and the psychology of negative sounds. One key point stood out: that the context in which a sound is heard influences how people perceive it, with sounds often being viewed more positively without context.

I used the list of the most unpleasant sounds from a web-based experiment by Trevor J. Cox, who investigated reactions to negative sounds. I tested the thirty-four sounds on different speakers to discover which worked best for cymatic patterns. I then narrowed down the thirty-four sounds to the final four sounds.

By presenting negative sounds visually without including the audio, Detestable Decibels challenges the audience to find beauty in the unpleasant. The combination of photography and the absence of sound ultimately transforms how people perceive these sounds.

References:
Stereo Babies by bone666138 — https://freesound.org/s/198848 / — License: Attribution 4.0
Fingernails on siding.wav by CGEffex — https://freesound.org/s/96224/ — License: Attribution 4.0
Metal_Gate_squeak_mono.aif by Suz_Soundcreations — https://freesound.org/s/192098/ — License: Attribution 4.0
Puke/Vomiting by Joao_de_Deus — https://freesound.org/s/330533/ — License: Attribution 4.0
Cox, Trevor J. “Scraping sounds and disgusting noises.” Applied Acoustics 69.12 (2008): 1195-1204.

Yuhang Wang

Things that refuse to settle, 2025

Reflecting on the enduring imprint of Confucian conditioning, this project examines the tension between inherited habits and contemporary experience. The work functions as a material analysis of this cultural duality. Instax solarization is employed to disrupt images of daily objects, rendering familiar surfaces estranged to mirror internal displacement. Parallel to this, analog film is processed using Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) rinses—substances deeply rooted in childhood family memories. Much like the slow, uncertain nature of this traditional healing, the unpredictable results emerge from the collision of Western technology and personal history. Through these unstable processes, the medium visualizes the complexity of cultural negotiation, where chemical interference becomes evidence of a quiet resistance.