Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2019


Annual exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery for this award for photographic portraits.

I thought it was a good show this year with some wonderful images. There seemed to be a theme of people photographing their mothers including the attached by Sirli Raitma of her mother who suffered from depression but posed in strange clothes and the process started to lift her out of her illness.

I liked Garrod Kitkwood’s joyous picture “The Hubbucks” a picture of a family going to the seaside with all the accoutrements for their trip, including an inflated dolphin, on the roof rack. You had to smile at the child with a mas of red curly hair with her head out of the window.  Sometimes it was the story that sold the picture such as with Ocled Wagenstein’s “Mordechai and Aryeh”, a picture of Mordechai mourning his partner of sixty years by wearing his clothes.

My favourite picture this year was by Seamus Ryan of Captain Hannah Graf MBE for a series called Pride in London. Graf is the highest rated trans woman in the Army. This is a tender, classic headshot of her in uniform.

This year’s In Focus section looked at work by Ethan James Green a fashion photographer, who, as a private project, took these pictures of LGTBQ+ people in New York. Lovely pictures of love and friendship.

Closes 16 February 2020

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