Photography Award nomination Jooney Woodward: 'Enhanced images can portray a false sense of reality, whereas my work celebrates the people and places as they appear every day.'

London-based photographer Jooney Woodward has become this year’s recipient of the Taylor Wessing Photographic prize.

The £12,000 prize money went to the 32-year-old freelance photographer for her idiosyncratic portrait of a young woman cradling her prized pet guinea pig at the Royal Welsh show. Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne, called the winning work “a brilliant, empathetic study of a young woman.”

Dorset-raised Woodward was also Highly Commended in the Observer Hodge Photographic Award in 2005. She has a long and fruitful working relationship with Wales. On her roadtrips there, she deliberately eschewed photographing the rolling green valleys and other clichéd postcard images of the country for the “anti-beauty spots”. Her mission was to capture Welsh culture in its raw state. The winning image for 2011 was discovered while Woodward was scouting for subjects at Wales’ annual agricultural fest in Powys.

Woodward uses real film, giving her work, said the Guardian, “a quality and depth” lacked by the sometimes flat images generated by digital cameras. “I don't mess around with Photoshop so what you see is what you get,” Woodward said. “Enhanced images can portray a false sense of reality, whereas my work celebrates the people and places as they appear every day.”