'Sparse yet powerful': moonlit portrait takes $30,000 prize

The resulting image, Alexis with moon, has won artist Amos Gebhardt the National Photographic Portrait Prize, one of the country's most popular exhibitions.

The work, a large-scale, two-panel portrait, is almost entirely black, with a sliver of crescent moon on one side, and the face of First Nations writer Alexis Wright on the other.

Although the work created a profound moment, and took many hours of careful planning, Gebhardt said they were "astonished" at being named the winner of the prize at the National Portrait Gallery.

Their work was selected from almost 2000 entries and 34 finalists, with the judges taken by the "sparse, yet powerful" relationship between sitter and artist.

Gebhardt said they'd initially contacted Wright - who has won the Miles Franklin award and the Stella Prize twice - as a fan of her work.

"I've read her books - her writing and her imagination is just startling, at an astonishing kind of scale," they said.

"She has always been someone who's captured my attention and imagination. I approached her and we had a long email conversation and kind of bonded over time and a couple of phone calls, before meeting in person.

"She was very kind and really understood what I wanted to do, and trusted me with this vision of pairing her with the elemental force of the moon."

The two met for the first time on the night of the photograph, and bonded in the darkness.

"It's an amazing thing under the moonlight in the night - there's something very powerful that happens when you're in silence, you're in the darkness in some ways, but the essence of people get drawn out," Gebhardt said.

Gebhardt will receive $30,000 and $20,000 worth of photographic equipment.

It's now the gallery's official prize season, with the winner of the biennial Darling Portrait Prize for painting announced the same morning.

Noel McKenna's depiction of his long-time agent and friend William Nuttall in a field with trees and horses is a challenge to the concept of portraiture, with the human figure surrounded by a much larger landscape.

"When I did it, I wasn't going to enter it in a competition. I just did the painting because I'm quite good friends with Bill," he said. "I'd spent the day on the farm down there with him, and I liked the photos I took, so I just mainly did a nice painting about him."

The gallery judges described the work as "an energetic and unexpected portrait ... It is joyous in its execution and demonstrates the skill of an established Australian artist whose practice is assured in every way," they said.

McKenna is a long-time painter from Sydney who has won several awards, including the 1994 Sulman Prize. Speaking to The Canberra Times over a roadside pie en route to Canberra, he had yet to see the work in the space.

"I work in quite a cramped studio ... I'm sure it will look quite different on the wall," he said.

He said the $75,000 prize was "a very good amount of money - I was very happy just to be hung, to be honest".

He said William Nuttall had been "very, very proud" to hear he'd won.

"I've known him for a long time, I first started showing with him in about 1985," he said. "He's my dealer, but he's sort of a friend as well."