Jodie Haydon and Anthony Albanese attend National Portrait Gallery

Melbourne artist Shea Kirk has won the National Photographic Portrait Prize with a nude portrait of his friend, Ruby.

Anthony Albanese and Jodie Hayden with Penny Fowler, left, and Bree Pickering. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Anthony Albanese and Jodie Hayden joined more than 40 artists at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra on Friday as they launched the exhibition of finalists in the National Photographic Portrait Prize.

Ms Haydon, as the Prime Minister’s partner, is the gallery’s chief patron, a role NPG chair Penny Fowler said helped bring attention to its work as a “democratic” collection.

“It is wonderfully supportive of our chief patron to bring the Prime Minister along to this important national cultural institution,” Ms Fowler said.

The NPG was founded 25 years ago and is dedicated to telling the story of Australia through portraiture. The collection was displayed at Old Parliament House before its current venue opened in 2008.

The National Photographic Portrait Prize was awarded to Shea Kirk for Ruby (Left View), his nude portrait of Emma Armstrong-Porter, an artist also known as Ruby.

Kirk and Armstrong-Porter worked together on the shoot for several hours, and decided on the unadorned portrait that captured the “honesty of self”.

“It’s often said that a good portrait depends on the hands and face – that they are the main ­expressive parts of a portrait,” Kirk said.

Shea Kirk with his winning work, Ruby (Left View). Picture: Mark Mohell

“But I try to see the whole: we are our limbs, we are our torso, it’s not just the face that makes you who you are.”

Kirk uses two cameras simultaneously to make a pair of stereoscopic images. While only the “left view” of Ruby is on display at the NPG, Kirk said the effect was a dialogue between viewer and the portrait subject.

Judges Tamara Dean, Daniel Boetker-Smith and Joanna Gilmour said Kirk’s portrait of Armstrong-Porter was a “masterful and technically complex work where the sitter has no self-consciousness”.

Kirk has won $30,000 from the NPG and $20,000 of photographic equipment from Canon.

Armstrong-Porter was also a ­finalist in the national prize, where 47 portraits were selected from ­almost 2400 entries.

Renae Saxby was highly commended for her portrait of Cindy Rostron on the road in Arnhem Land, and David Cossini won the Art Handlers Award for his portrait of Ugandan man Godfrey Baguma.

The NPG has recently appointed a new director, Bree Pickering, and received $27m in additional funding as part of the Albanese government’s $535m investment in the national collecting institutions.