Essence of home captured in Adam Ferguson’s prize-winning shot

After a career that took him all over the world, photographer Adam Ferguson found himself thinking of home in Australia. One of his pictures just won the inaugural Galah regional photography prize.

This portrait of drovers Faren and Violet near Winton in Queensland by Adam Ferguson won first prize in Galah magazine’s photography prize.

After photographing multiple portraits for the cover of Time Magazine, capturing a haunting series of photos for The New York Times of Nigerian girls ­kidnapped by Boko Haram to be suicide bombers, and memorialising for National Geographic the artists among Cree people, indigenous to northern Quebec, Adam Ferguson found himself thinking of home in Australia.

“I had a certain existential crisis,” he said over the phone from Tasmania. “It’s hard work, you know, covering conflicts, and I also just felt most of my international work had been made with the help of translators and local journalists and working in foreign contexts, and I just had this moment as a storyteller where I felt compelled to photograph my own country and my own story.”

So he moved back to Australia and hit the road to photograph Australia as he saw it.

“My ongoing body of work is looking at the kind of colonial legacy and the idea of the bush as a concept,” Ferguson said.

“The reality in contemporary Australia is that 85 per cent of the population lives on the east and southeast coast. It’s very much part of our ­national mythology, this concept of the bush … but it is either simplified or ­presented in a pretty two-dimensional narrative, or it’s often ­ignored or misunderstood.”

Ferguson’s portrait of drovers Faren and Violet has won the inaugural Galah regional photography prize, organised by the eponymous Galah magazine that focuses on regional life.

Ferguson said he met Faren years ago when he was on assignment about drought and had reached out again when embarking on his new project.

“I think Faren, as a young woman working on the land with predominantly old men, really found this kind of really quite intimate kinship with Violet.

“They were these two young, strong women out there working on the land. I just felt like I had captured a moment when they both let their guard down for me and just kind of stared straight through the camera.”