Alana Perino: Pictures of Birds - 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner

Overview

Alana Perino’s Pictures of Birds constructs a mesmeric evocation of memory and mortality in Longboat Key, Florida, where Perino temporarily moved in 2020 to be with their mother and father, whose health was in decline. Here, family roles were rewritten as Perino and their sister became their parents’ caretakers, and the series reflects on the strange experience of living in “a home and a retirement community arranged to affirm health and security yet compromised by the ubiquity of illness and impermanence.” Perino has created an expansive family portrait that captures a time and place suspended between memory and dream.

Alana Perino was born in 1988 and grew up in New York City, the North Fork of Long Island, and the stretch of highway between the two. They studied European intellectual history and photography at Wesleyan University. Perino lived in California for eight years, crisscrossing the country to photograph heritage sites. In the summer of 2021, they returned to the East Coast to photograph “the people and places that raised them” and to complete the MFA Photography program at RISD. They currently live in Rhode Island, where they are an assistant professor at Johnson & Wales University.

About the Prize:

Founded in 2006, the annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography—identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, over one thousand artists from sixty-five countries submitted entries to the Prize competition. The shortlisted artists are Sara Abbaspour, Alana Perino, Emma Ressel, Hashem Shakeri, and Daria Svertilova.

Aperture invited a jury of cross-disciplinary creatives to judge the 2025 prize: Noelle Flores Théard, senior digital photo-editor, The New Yorker; Lucy Gallun, curator, Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Zack Hatfield, managing editor, Aperture magazine; and Mark Armijo McKnight, artist and 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize winner.

The 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize is supported by MPB.

Click here more information about the prize.