Beautiful Winning Photos From The 2020 Head On Portrait Award

The winner of the 2020 Head On portrait prize is Australian photographer Fiona Wolf, with her image titled The gift, RHW 2020. Here is a selection of photographs from the 40 finalists.

The Gift. A modern family story of a girl born by a warrior woman to two dads with the love and support of a wonderful family around them. Photograph: Fiona Wolf

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Yuendumu, NT, 2019. Australian runner up. Photograph: Jon Frank

Egbert. International runner up. ‘I hid his mother under a cloth as Egbert felt safe in the arms of his caretaker, but was still the hero of the photograph. I first used this technique for portraits of cats and later I realised it had been used before. In the old days of long exposures, when children were just as squirmy as they are now, mothers and fathers were covered with decorative fabrics to keep the children in place and prevent blurry pictures.’ Photograph: Jouk Oosterhof

Kashmir’s Half-Widow. Shamla Begum was 53 when her husband, Fathiq Nargar, was abducted by unknown people on July 5, 1990. The conflict in Kashmir has given rise to a category of women known as ‘half-widows’. Photograph: Wei Tan

Young Riders. ‘D’Kamiyon Johnson, left, and Carlos Smith share a horse outside a rodeo in Greenville, Mississippi on 27 October 2018. This photo is part of my ongoing project about the overlooked subculture of African American cowboys and cowgirls where I live in the rural Mississippi Delta.’ Photograph: Rory Doyle

Our Childhood Swimming Pool. ’My father had just finished raking the leaves out when I made this portrait of him in the childhood swimming pool. He still tends to it even though it’s no longer used. Here it lives in a continuous state of decay. This pool is where he taught me how to swim when I was one and a half years old. This is the pool where so many home videos were made. This is the state of the pool now, and has been for years. I made this portrait after not seeing him for eight months.’ Photograph: Vikesh Kapoor

King Street, 2018. ‘From the series In visible light. It is a personal project that interrogates my perceptions and experiences of living in Sydney – a city where the cost of living has never been higher and the sense of anxiety never more acutely felt.’ Photograph: Sam Ferris

Bruce Pascoe at Gipsy Point. Highly acclaimed Australian author Bruce Pascoe in between defending his East Gippsland bush property from fire and dealing with the controversial media storm questioning his Indigenous heritage. Photograph: Rachel Mounsey

Blackout. Merry is one of the victims of the 1992 war in Abkhazia. Her brother and her 53-year-old husband were both murdered by Abkhaz separatist forces. With a wounded leg, she escaped and hid in a forest for two weeks. At the end of the war, separatists decided to empty Abkhazia of Georgians by trucks. Merry joined this group and, after traveling a long way, she reached her new home in Tskaltubo. Since then, she has lived alone in a small room inside a huge abandoned building. Years ago, in the Soviet Union era, it had been a famous luxury sanitarium. Photograph: Hossein Fardinfard

Pa and his Pet Rooster. Photograph: Bob Newman

Jesse and Frankie. ‘Part of my Urban Horse series … I’m exploring human and horse connections in the urban environment.’ Photograph: Grace Costa

Foreign Places. ‘Seeing my daughter here took me back to my first experiences of travel – staying in bedrooms so different from home. These in-between moments fascinate me: waiting in strange places; long pauses we don’t normally experience in day-to-day life; our senses heightened by cultural differences. We had stayed overnight in a private home in a frugal room on a remote lake in Albania. My daughter had just woken. She recalibrated her senses in this strange, isolated place.’ Photograph: Cathy Ronalds

Motherly love. ‘Angela comes from Nigeria. At the end of December 2017 she gave birth to her first child, Gift, at Sant’Anna hospital in Turin. Angela had a premature delivery and she had to remain in hospital for longer due to her daughter’s medical condition.’ Photograph: Federico Tisa

The beach portrait. A woman poses for a portrait in a fantastic stage, located on Aguadulce Beach, the most popular in the coastal city of Lima, Peru. Photograph: Adrian Portugal

Pete. Pete says that he is not perfect in many ways, but he is proud of the body that he has been given, scars and all. Photograph: Anastasia Trahanas

Madonna and child. ‘The mother of four is holding her daughter. The girl, who is 10 months old, is playing with fox skin. The family is interethnic: the mother is Russian and father is half Tungus. Taken in the Katangsky District, Irkutsk region, Far North of Russia, 2016.’ Photograph: Elena Anosova

Landon and Joey. Photograph: Justin McManus