Asanka Ratnayake, The Weight of Wool (DOCUMENTARY & STREET 2026)

Inside a shearing shed in Gippsland Victoria, a wool handler wrestles a mass of freshly shorn wool into a hydraulic press. I framed the worker almost engulfed by the fleece, using its scale to make the physical labour behind wool production immediately visible. This was shot as part of a photo essay I worked on last year in light of Australian wool production forecast to fall to its lowest level in more than a century, the image connects an intimate act of manual labour with the growing uncertainty facing one of the country’s oldest rural industries.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.