Cathy's Art Diary

Thin exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery exploring the results of a partnership project with six universities from across England and Wales exploring contemporary portrait photography. The gallery offers a series of talks, workshops and tours to which the students respond producing works reacting to the previous year's Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize. I say it is a thin show as there are only a few works shown with minimal explanation. The majority of the work was shown in rolling av display which was quite long to watch in a space with no seating. This intriguing show deserves a better presentation. Closes 18 September 2026

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery as a result of their annual partnership project with six universities exploring contemporary portrait photography. For this partnership the gallery brings together curators and photographers with students via talks, workshops and tours and invites them to make their own work based on themes from the previous year's Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize but these weren’t outlined. The show was in a small gallery so there was a disappointing number of works on show which they compensated with by three audiovisual displays, which was a bit much for the space. I would also have liked to know a bit more about the works in the av show as it was they were just interesting images. Closed 28 September 2025