Every two years the National Photography Prize offers an opportunity to consider the vital role of photography in contemporary art in Australia. The National Photography Prize brings together artists from across Australia who are developing and challenging photographic language and techniques.

Generously supported by the MAMA Art Foundation, the National Photography Prize offers an acquisitive $40,000 Audray Banfield Award, the $5000 John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for an emerging practitioner, and further supports a number of artists through focused acquisitions.

Winner The 2026 National Photography Prize ($40,000) Paul Knight lives and works on Darkinjung Country in Ettalong Beach, NSW. His practice explores intimacy, gentleness, and the social structures that shape closeness. His photographic practice considers the image as a container for experience and examines how loving bonds are formed and expressed.

Knight’s ongoing series Chamber Music documents the domestic life he shares with his partner Peter. Through portraiture and still life, Knight's prints balance intention and chance and create a sustained meditation on intimacy as a counterpoint to power and hierarchy. The work reflects on how relationships are shaped and communicated through everyday life.

Paul Knight was born in 1976 in Warrane/Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Ettalong Beach, NSW.

Gallery Neon Parc Melbourne, Brunswick

The work of Paul Knight drifts between the spaces of intimacy and distance and spans photography, hand-woven textiles and installation. His hand woven works, via materiality and form have their foundations in domestic textiles and evoke colour field painting through abstract relationships with nature and the built environment. The ongoing photographic series ‘Chamber Music’ (2009–present) considers intimacy as a conceptual position, documenting the day-to-day life Knight has shared with his partner Peter over the course of their relationship. The camera moves from Knight to his partner, to bystanders in the street and is, on occasion, positioned on available surfaces and set with a timer, all capturing the intimacy, domesticity and repose of everyday scenes. As well as, the intricacies of details of interiors such as ceiling lamps, unmade beds and accidental still lives. This process connects to a sense of the photographer's own agency and forms a gaze that elevates the diaristic approach into one loosened from notions of time, freed to explore ideas of volume and potential behind the print plain.