While the odds of being selected as a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize are much tougher than those for the Archibald Portrait Prize, the National Photographic Portrait Prize appears in the Australian art scene as a poor cousin of its illustrious Sydney counterpart.

Of course, it is foolhardy to generalise from the 39 finalists who were selected from a field of more than 3000 entries, but certainly the sitters included in the final cut generally lack the celebrity status of many of those in the Archibald. It is more a case of documentary photography of family, friends and situations than studio photography of the worthy and notorious. The other broad observation, which also needs to be covered by the same caveat, in that I am only looking at the work of the finalists rather than the broad field of entries, is the lack of technical diversity compared even with the Archibald despite its plethora of acrylic giant heads.

Of the finalists, 33 are represented by digital photographs, some realised as ink jet prints, with only three gelatin silver prints and three type C photographs. This should not necessarily be seen as a criticism, but there is a great sameness in technique and scale that prevails throughout the show – as if many of the entries could be the work of the same photographer.

Many of the finalists are well-known practitioners in art photography circles and, while this may not be a "who’s who" of prominent professional photographers, the $30,000 prize, plus the bag of goodies and the ensuing publicity, has flushed out a number of the key players.

Sarah Rhodes is a Sydney-trained photographer who I first encountered over a decade ago when she produced a series of penetrating photographs of Australian artists, including Jeffrey Smart and Margaret Olley, and subsequently through her insightful and introspective images of children with a slightly gothic, threatening note in the background. One of these colour-saturated images was a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize five years ago. Her entry this year, Mirror identical twins with autism (2018), is one of the standout photographs in the selection.

The strength of Rhodes’ photograph lies not purely in the subject matter but in the technical realisation of the image. She explains: “Liam and Rohan, aged eighteen, are mirror identical twins with severe autism. One is left-handed, the other right-handed. One is high functioning; the other is lower functioning. They are both socially isolated, but because they are twins they have each other. I made this image as a double exposure to represent the boys’ identicalness, but also to offer an insight into their minds, particularly their anxiety. The background of the image seeps through, suggesting these two boys could be the same person – different sides of the one self, one wearing black, the other wearing white.”

This slightly eerie, uncanny quality is perfectly realised in this gelatin silver print, where the duality in this highly staged image has been thought through to the final detail as we, as viewers, are involved in the duality of every aspect of the composition and span of emotions. Defiance meets with vulnerability, openness with withdrawal and shyness with an outward radiance of compassion.

Another photograph to which I kept returning, That’s not my mother (2018), was taken by a photographer I have not previously encountered, Rosa Spring Voss. Voss is an Australian, apparently working in Berlin as an "analog photographer" – by this I understand using film rather than a digital camera. She has produced a very clever photograph of her mother, Victoria Spring, neatly blocking out the head of the Mona Lisa on a framed reproduction within a carefully composed tableau. Leaving aside the narrative of the mother/daughter relationship, it is a very powerfully encoded image that can be deciphered on many levels. Realised as a humble black and white gelatin silver print, it possesses a beautiful surface, which admits our gaze, while the sitter directs hers slightly over our heads.

The quirkiest photograph is Alex Vaughan’s Sumbawa Pride – Life on a Boat with Eleven Kids (2018). Vaughan, a Sydney-based photographer best known for her work with actors, in this staged photograph captures parents with their 11 children on board their boat Sumbawa, while anchored off Chinamans Beach in Sydney in February 2018. Once the feel-good factor of these new age hippies wears off, so does the impact of the image.

It is a similar case with the prize-winning Greta In Her Kitchen, 36 weeks (2018) by Alana Holmberg. This Melbourne-based documentary photographer, who like Vaughan was a finalist in an earlier incarnation of this prize, in her digital photograph has caught her heavily pregnant sister from the side, while reflected from the front in her kitchen window. It is certainly striking and effective, but a little self-evident after the initial encounter.

Over the past decade, the National Photographic Portrait Prize has established for itself a reputation as a forum for portrait photography in this country. It remains to be seen if it can reinvent itself into something more than the poor photographic cousin of the Archibald.