Artist Description
Growing up in the countryside in Brazil, I got hold of a camera for the first time at age nine, after winning a contest at primary school. I took photos of everything and everyone. Unfortunately many of the rolls of film I went through were never developed. I still think of those never seen photographs. I am now a Melbourne-based photographic artist and have been living in Australia for the past 13 years. Most of my work deals with my migration and the inherent void I feel for not quite knowing where I belong. I am also interested in the notions of intimacy and the spectrum of personal relationships. I am obsessed with moths.

Artist Description
Matteo Dal Vera (b. 1998) is a photographer based in Sydney, Australia. Michael Weatherill (b. 1994) is a photographer currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Interested in the process of working long-form, Matteo Dal Vera and Michael Weatheril's collaborative practice explores a narrative that lies in a space between the documentary aesthetic and constructed conceptual imagery. Their latest project, 'The Bridge', compiles photographs made around a single body of water, which they returned to over the duration of a year.

Artist Description
Ollie Hodgkins is a Melbourne-based documentary photographer. He is a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Photography at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, with a major in Photojournalism. Ollie’s work primarily focuses on rural communities in Australia, exploring the postcolonial tensions that reverberate between settlers and the Australian landscape. In 2018, Ollie was accepted into a workshop with World Press Photo ambassador and photobook designer Teun van der Heijden, where he worked amongst photographers such as Adam Ferguson, Ying Ang and Raphaela Rosella. In 2019, Ollie was nominated for the World Press Photo 6x6 Global Talent Program.

Book
The Moat was produced as a third year project at Photography Studies College, Melbourne French Island, off the coast of Western Port Bay in Victoria, has no police station or utility services and falls under no municipal jurisdiction. It is a place of quiet strangeness. Its bucolic idealism is shielded from mainland influence by a body of water. Home to a community of drifters and dreamers, the locals possess a utilitarian pride that masks a wariness of the island’s fragile autonomy. By documenting the island's community, The Moat examines the concept of isolation, along with the allure and aversion to it that permeates in Australian culture.
 
Judges’ Comment
A powerful and focused portrait of an island and its community told through a rich selection of well-sequenced and varied content, including an accompanying booklet insert. Our understanding on a way of life expands, and our interest grows, as pages go by and this unusual locality and its inhabitants are presented.

Artist Description
Jordan Madge is a photographer from Melbourne, Australia. Primarily adopting the role of observer, he aims at exploring social and physical landscapes. In 2015 he graduated with a BA of Photography. He has been featured in publications such as BJP, VICE, Landscape Stories and Paper-Journal Magazine. During 2017 he held a solo exhibition at the CCP in Melbourne and was in a group show at the Australian Centre for Photography. In 2016, he was awarded the Australian Photobook of the Year and in 2017 The CCP’s Instagram Project winner. He has completed residency programs in Australia and Japan and was most recently selected as a finalist for the National Photographic Portrait Prize.

Book
Banana Spider Bite visually documents Madge's voluntary migration to a foreign country - a move inspired by a romantic gesture. It explores his eventual understanding of a new place, and a personal relationship that grew while there. The images are purposely nondescript, and reflect the experiences that influenced the lovers time together. This is Madge's second time as a Photobook Award finalist. He was co-winner of the Australian award in 2015.

​Judges’ Comment
A visually captivating work that details the emotional upheaval of moving to a foreign land. Part romantic account and part photographic observation, this compact publication features honest, saturated and often dim and shadowy images that intrigue and involve the viewer. A small pill that works very well.

Artist Description
I am a 23 year old Somalian photographic artist who moved to New Zealand with family in 1998 when I was three years old. After a long civil war, which began in 1991, Somalia was no longer safe and my family arrived as refugees in Auckland seeking a calmer place and better livelihood and educational opportunities. According to a 2017 UNHCR report, “More than two million Somalis are currently displaced by a conflict that has lasted over two decades, and an estimated 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Somalia”. I am deaf and study with the help of a sign language interpreter. I am currently in my third year of a Bachelor of Creative Enterprise at Unitec, with a focus on photography.

Book
My first photo book Imaanshaha, which means "arrival”, is an intimate portrait of my family members at home in Mt Roskill, where they share close cultural connections with the local Muslim and Somali community. The photographs in Imaanshaha were taken during the last two years. Leaving Somalia opened up new doors and opportunities for her family: education, cars and a sense of freedom. The book reflects why family is so important to Muse, and how despite leaving their home country, a deep-rooted sense of culture and religion is still embedded within their life. "No matter where I am I cannot forget where I have come from and what makes me who I am." Imaanshaha was designated as #91 in the PhotoForum Inc publication series.  

Judges’ Comment
An important publication, that gives voice to the perspective of young, refugee women making a new life in Aotearoa New Zealand. It explores the author’s evolving identity through the lens of femininity, youth culture, religious and cultural identity. Viewed in the context of racism in Aotearoa, and in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, this is a significant book from one to watch.

Artist Description
Rotman (born 1974, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand) is an artist working between Aotearoa New Zealand and the USA. He lives in San Francisco. Rotman’s work has been exhibited in the USA, Australia and New Zealand and is represented in collections in the USA and Australasia. He is the recipient of the Prix Du Livre Images Vevey (2018) and The Marti Friedlander Photographic Award (2013).

Artist Description
Jonathan May is an award-winning advertising and portrait photographer. May is best known for his long term personal projects and is fascinated by people living on the fringes of society.

Book
Ingo Hansen is the protagonist in this documentary photo book. Struggling with his health and searching for answers, he returns to the desert opal mining town where he grew up - Andamooka. At a crossroads in life, he seeks comfort in reminiscing about the crazy adventures he had, in the harsh landscapes he had them. Hansen soon realises that the thriving outback town he once loved is now bleak and it mercilessly parallels his own impermanence; the harsh winds of life blow not just on the desert but also inside his heart. It takes a certain type of person to love a place like this, with the isolation and the desolation, but his love is plain and clear.

Judges’ Comment
A coherent, well structured, and beautiful photo essay that transcends the familiarity of its theme. The words and pictures are well edited and integrated, the colour palette is striking and consistent, while the varying page compositions help maintain the reader’s engagement with the book. 

Artist Description
Alice Connew is a New Zealand-born, Berlin-based photographer. Her work transpires from a seemingly unconscious stream of intangible visual connections which occur throughout daily life. These links often show themselves at a later‚ and usually unexpected‚ time. She is the co-founder of GLORIA Books, a publishing collective focused on the publication of art and photography books.

Book
This pocket-sized book was borne from a desire to experiment with a multi-disciplinary approach to photo book making, bringing together performance, sound, video, photography and design within the pages of a book. It is also a catalogue for the enabling infrastructures of human progress, growth and development - physical, ethical, economic and biological - expressed through photography. Introduced by the transcription of a performance by Oliver, the remaining pages feature images of the performer traversing organic, industrial and stylised landscapes.  

Judges’ Comment
An innovative, conceptually driven photobook that successfully draws on the disciplines of performance and photography. Its compelling design elements, and unorthodox approach to subject matter, keep the viewer thinking as they move through the book. Strong visual elements all come together in a well resolved and original package.

Artist Description
Sarah Pannell (b. 1988, Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian documentary photographer whose work concerns culture, landscape, tradition and community. Travelling regularly, Sarah's work observes how a landscape is marked by both history and accelerated modernisation, capturing the tension between these different influences and the result when past and present collide.

Book
Tabriz to Shiraz is the debut book by Melbourne-based photographer Sarah Pannell, drawing on a vibrant series of photos taken during her travels through Iran in 2016 and 2017. Beyond mere travelogue, Tabriz to Shiraz flits between the poetic, intimate, incisive and playful in its un-layering of contemporary Iran's visual, cultural and architectural languages and subjectivities. Spanning portraiture, landscape, architecture and impromptu formalist photography, Pannell offers different views on a place that is at once familiar, foreign and happily jarring in its multiplicity.

Judges’ Comment
A superior travel diary revealing the journey of a woman as she encounters everyday life, traditions, and new friendships in Iran. The photography is exquisite, sensitive and compelling, while the design is sympathetic to the images and allows them to do their work. The delicate single signature opens flat, making it easy to enjoy the spreads and to focus on the rhythm and flow of the edit. 

Artist Description
David Symons is a Brisbane based artist. Born in Scotland, he studied photography in Western Australia in the 1980s. David has exhibited locally and nationally and has been a finalist prizes including The Olive Cotton Award and the IRIS Award. His photographic work is held in The Art Gallery of Western Australia Collection. The idea that the photograph sits precariously on the edge of the real and imagined is the great appeal of the medium to David. He believes that photo book is an ideal platform to explore the metafictional (or metaphotographic) qualities of the photograph image. The Man from Apophenia is the realization of this idea in book form.

Book
Symons is fascinated by the way photography sits on the edge of the real and imagined, so it is no surprise that apophenia, the condition where human's perceive connections between unrelated things, is the driving force behind this book. He couples images that are reminiscent of the film noir and police evidence photos, with a low-voltage current of psychoanalytical and surrealist themes, to create a narrative of unreliable evidence. The reader is left wondering, looking for patterns, connections and meanings, and in doing so their biases, fears, and delusions shape the reading of the work and may lead to false conclusions.
 
Judges’ Comment
A stark and formally arresting book with many wonderful and compelling visual elements. The sense of juxtaposition and the striking edits that drive this book, married with gatefolds, rich black and white prints, and the shifting formal registers of full bleed and white borders around a grouping of well-considered and strong images, make it a well resolved package.