Gold in Fine Art/Landscape / 2024 / Fine Art / Landscape

• Prize
  Gold in Fine Art/Landscape
• Photographer
  Rand Leeb-du Toit, Australia
• Date of Photograph
  1 May 2024
• Studio
  Rand Fotografie International
• Website
  http://randfotografie.international
• Instagram
  @randleebdutoit

Situated within the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Shark Bay on Denham Sound is Useless Loop, a salt mining operation and shown in this photo taken from an open door light fixed wing plane are the salt crystallisation ponds caught in late afternoon light. Useless Loop got its name from the French explorer Henri-Louis de Saulces de Freycinet who thought the harbour was blocked by a sandbar and was therefore "useless" - Havre Inutile.

Rand Leeb-du Toit is a Sydney-based internationally awarded fine-art photographer and visual novelist working at the intersection of portraiture and constructed narrative. The Encoded, a ten-portrait body of work translating Australia's critically endangered species onto human faces through hours-long handmade makeup, photographed on Leica and printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, is the visual heart of a larger four-book literary universe completed in 2026. His practice insists on the handmade image in the age of the synthetic one: no generative tools are used at any stage of the work.

Awards His work has been recognised through the Prix de la Photographie Paris, The Landscape Awards and the Mono Awards and been featured in Galah Magazine. He published his first photobook, Days to Live: An Aerial Perspective in 2025.