The $30,000 biennial National Photography Prize has been awarded to Australian-based Norwegian artist Ellen Dahl's Four Days before Winter.
The works, featured among those of other finalists at the Murray Art Museum Albury, explore the collapsing terrains of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard - the fastest warming place on earth.
"I think it was the the way that she has captured and created the image," prize judge Nici Cumpston told AAP.
"All of the tones or the elements of that country or that landscape have been rendered exactly, in my mind, as they should be."
Olga Svyatova's They/Они, exploring the connections between her own photographs and her family's, won the $5000 John and Margaret Baker Fellowship for exceptional emerging artist.
The works of all finalists will be on exhibition at the art museum until September.
"There's just been some moments within the works that are really quite personal and intimate and nostalgic," curator and selection panel member Nanette Orly told AAP.
"Contemporary photography today is looking at really challenging what our preconceived notions of photography are."
Other finalist work includes staged photography, digital and analog interactions, collage, archival reflection and chromatography - the separation of organic material pigments through mobile fluids.
"Some of the most surprising elements of this show up in our works that have really tapped into something that's very visceral or really emotional," Ms Orly said.
The event has been running since 1983 and is the nation's longest running acquisitive photography prize. Previous recipients include Tiyan Baker, Debra Phillips and Amanda Williams.
"Artists working with photography, have always pushed those boundaries, played with its parameters, platelets, materials, pushed it to territories that maybe we're not used to thinking about," the museum's chief executive Blair French told AAP.
Entry to the exhibition is free and it runs from March 23 to September 1.
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