Beautiful portrait teases a life of rich memories for Bachelor of Fine Arts student Anna Finch, winner of the 2023 Simon Devitt Prize for Photography.

Beguiling, uncanny image wins annual photography prize. Master of Architecture student Gujin Chung wins the 2022 Simon Devitt Prize for Photography.

Congratulations to our 2021 winner: Chloe Alderton, Master of Urban Planning and Urban Design student with ‘The quarter acre dream’.

The Prize for 2020 is different because the world is different. This beckoned the theme Isolation for its entrants to interpret.

Simon Devitt Prize for Photography
Winner 2016

Jodie Salmond is the winner of the 2016 Simon Devitt Prize for Photography.


The postgraduate student from Elam School of Fine Arts was awarded the 2016 Simon Devitt Prize for Photography, for her series of three images captured using an iPhone.

This year’s theme was ‘a chance encounter’ and Salmond, who is in her final-year of her Masters of Fine Arts (MFA), included two haiku poems as part of her tryptich entitled ‘When I’m night driving’.

Judge Simon Devitt, described Salmond’s work as ‘beguiling and arresting’. When presenting the prize to her he said “the winning work took risks, pairing a familiar night road trip scene with a close up study of an aggregate surface and road markings, which were unsettling in their shift of speed and scale.”


The Simon Devitt Prize for Photography is an annual award to celebrate the best student photograph at the University of Auckland, Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries with this year’s theme entitled: A Chance Encounter.

A selection of twenty finalist from seventy entries have been chosen for this year’s exhibition to feature in the Auckland Festival of Photography Fringe Programme. The overall winner will receive the Simon Devitt Prize for Photography Trophy, NZ$1000 and a Canon Power Shot G7X camera.

Thank you to our valued sponsors and partners:
Simon Devitt, Auckland Festival of Photography, Canon and John Leech Framing Workshop

See the exhibition images here »

Awarded annually in recognition of the best student photograph in Architecture, The Simon Devitt Prize for Photography is now in it’s eighth year. This year’s theme is the ‘Final Frontier’. The finalists have been selected and will be exhibited as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography Fringe Programme.

Opening
5:00pm
Tuesday 26 May

Exhibition
27 May – 6 June from Wed – Sat
11am – 4pm

Elam Projectspace Gallery
Ground Floor Main Fine Arts Building
20 Whitaker Place

Auckland Festival of Photography details »

See last year’s winner »

Photo credit: Winner 2014, Alice O’Brien-Gortner, Extinguished

 

 

 

The winner of this years Simon Devitt Prize for Photography competition is Alice O’Brien-Gortner.

The annual competition, now in it’s seventh year, was established at the Auckland School of Architecture and Planning.

O’Brien-Gortner, a third-year Bachelor of Architectural Studies student, receives a trophy and $1000 prize money after her image was chosen from a field of twenty finalists.

This year’s theme was The In-Between and I selected Extinguished as the winning entry because this is where the image seems to live.

There is a highly evocative sense of ‘another’ place we get when we experience this photograph.

O’Brien-Gortner has created an imagined world that perhaps raisers more questions than it answers for the viewer.

Her photograph leaves us in a challenging and uneasy place, wondering how we arrived.

A selection this years best entries are on show until 7 June as part of the Auckland festival of Photography.

The 2014 Simon Devitt Prize for Photography Exhibition
28 May-7 June
Foyer, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland
22 Symonds Street

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Samuel Wong is the winner of this years prize for his entry ‘Rider’.

My description of his winning entry:

“The winning photograph left me in no doubt. Its a picture I wish I had made myself. The sense of the uncanny, the surreal and a poetic nod to the theme are all captivating characteristics of the winning photograph. The winning entry reveals a deceptively ambiguous narrative that held my attention and begged re-visiting. Its success rests, uneasily in between the everyday and the otherworldly.”