Founded more than 150 years ago to collect the portraits of distinguished British men and women, it is appropriate that the National Portrait Gallery should encourage emerging and contemporary talent as well as address current issues around the photographic portrait.
For the past five years, the law firm Taylor Wessing has sponsored an open competition in which photographers can submit images for possible inclusion in the exhibition.
The latest competition attracted nearly 6,000 submissions from more than 2,400 photographers from around the world. The selected 60 works for the exhibition include the four prize-winners.
Far from being about images of the world’s most famous personalities – although some are included – most of the subjects are friends and family of the photographer. As we are unlikely to know who many of the people in the pictures are, they aim to set up some sort of narrative, to establish contact with the viewer. Each image has to tell its own story. Through editorial, advertising and fine art images, the entrants have explored a range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family.
This year’s first prize, £12,000, has been awarded to David Chancellor, 49, for his portrait, Huntress with Buck. Photographed in the evening, it depicts 14-year-old Josie Slaughter from Alabama mounted on a horse with the dead animal slung across in front of her on her first hunting trip to South Africa. Set in luscious, mountainous landscape it has something of the feel of the 19th century artist Landseer, although he tended to show his animals alive. While not to everyone’s taste – the buck is a majestic creature – the image sets up powerful contrasts between the peace and tranquillity and vulnerability and strength.
Altogether more personal is the work of the second prize-winner. Three thousand pounds has been awarded to Panayiotis Lamprou for Portrait of my British Wife from the series Human Presence. Taken at the couple’s summerhouse on the small island of Schinousa in the Aegean Sea on a hot summer’s day, the woman, wearing only a slight shift, sits with her legs apart in an intimate pose that suggests great trust between photographer, model
and viewer. Lamprou describes the portrait as “independence and love, devotion and freedom”.
More conventional but delightful is Jonathan Root’s portrait of David Hockney and his little dog Ruby who sits by his side. Root’s image captures the boyish spirit of the irrepressible artist who refuses to stand still in his work, which fills the wall behind him. By contrast, Andrea Stern’s image of a group of soldiers stand glowering at the camera, reluctant models for the photographer’s eye.
While the Taylor Wessing exhibition aims for the middle road in both choice of subjects and in stylistic approach, it demonstrates above all that the interest, and concern with, the photographic portrait, far from being redundant is very much alive and thriving.
The exhibition continues until February 20 and will then go on tour to the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens from April 16 until June 26.
