Although the year will always be synonymous with Covid, the pandemic - as most world changing events go - tends to overshadow everything else. Or more to the point, vaccines and daily tallies tend to be recalled before bushfires, drought or even the little nuances that pandemic life brought with it.

You only need to see the finalists in the National Photographic Portrait Prize for it to all come flooding back. The prize is, after all, 79 photos of what made 2020 well, 2020.

And a monumental year, deserves a monumental exhibition. Living Memory: National Photographic Portrait Prize has a larger than usual number included in the prize's exhibition. But even with such a large selection of photographs, more than 3000 entries meant that judges - National Portrait Gallery director Karen Quinlan, National Gallery of Australia director Nick Mitzevich, and renowned Australian photographer Bill Henson - still had a big job deciding on the finalists, and eventual prize winners.

To show just how much happened last year, you just need to compare two of this year's finalists - New Year's Eve 2019 by Allison Marion and NYE 2020 by John Janson-Moore.

The first is one that many will be familiar with. The Mallacoota mother's photo of her son, 11-year-old Finn, was taken as they, along with the boy's younger brother and family dog, fled the 2019/2020 bushfires.

The image of the young boy in a mask - in a time before masks meant Covid - driving the boat to safety as the red skies and haze surrounded them, was splashed across news websites and front pages across the world.

It's in stark contrast to the photograph captured a year later by Janson-Moore.

Taken in Sydney, it shows a crowd of people enjoying the New Year's Eve fireworks. In the foreground there's a sign saying "Help stop the spread of COVID-19", making it clear that the crowd was ignoring social distancing rules and public health orders to bring in the new year.

The time between these two events saw much transpire, some of which was captured by photographers and now displayed on the portrait gallery's walls.

There are photographs of devastated families surrounded by bushfire-ravaged landscapes and others that portray people finding new ways of connecting to nature in a time where our freedom of movement was limited. Some show the birthdays that were celebrated over video calls, others show those who had to find ways to connect with grandparents through the safety of glass windows.

And in what is potentially the most 2020 way to take a photo, this year's exhibition even includes a portrait taken oven Zoom.

What photographer Suzanne Phoenix has labelled as a "virtual portrait", her photo, Artists in residence - Carlos, Jono and Lazy Susan, was one of 50 taken with Victorian artists via Zoom calls during lockdown 2.0. And, as is to be expected, it has the pixellated quality that comes from taking a photo through the screen.

Together, the exhibition's photos make up a record of what most, if not all of us, experienced to some extent in 2020.

"These photos come back to something which feels - authentic is almost isn't a good enough word for it. It's almost as though really good pictures always recommend the truth," Henson says.

"They have something about them that feels true.

"These situations send everyone back into themselves in different ways. That is one of the great gifts of any interesting art. It does send you back into yourself. Because there's no correct way of looking at Rembrandt or listening to Mozart, there's only your way."

It was, however, an image that did not speak overtly of the Covid experience that took out this year's top prize. According to Karen Quinlan, however, the isolation depicted in the photograph is something that has taken on new meaning since the pandemic.

Joel Brian Pratley's Drought Story shows a farmer walking away from the camera into a vast landscape covered in a haze of red dust.

"This one stood out for us, and for me - it's just the barren nature of it," Quinlan says.

"And I think for people who have been in lockdown, in particular, it's one they will relate to. It's this sense of isolation, and that feeling of the ground shifting under you all the time.

"The photo would probably work without the human figure as well. I think it's just a really beautiful landscape, but we are into portraits here."

Every other artist statement describes the circumstances surrounding the image in a paragraph. Pratley, instead, simply said "Sometimes you think, why am I here?"

Perhaps this limited description added to this sense that the photo is a window into a farmer's silent moment. Henson describes it in the words of Swedish poet Per Lagerkvist - "Soft like oblivion."

"What I was looking for in a photo was probably was what most people are looking for - strength and gentleness, which is the great combination," he says.

"It's a tenderness, a grace, perhaps a quietness amid all the yelling and righteous grandstanding that makes up so much of public life these days.

"That particular image contained a lot of that. It showed human nature is a very small part of nature in general. And I think it's a great reminder of both the beauty and the terror of nature."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: