the national portrait gallery, London

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days in London last week. The weather was cold and wet, perfect for spending days meandering through galleries. I’ve been shooting a lot of portraits in the last year and made a beeline for the National Portrait Gallery, nestled behind the National Gallery, just off Trafalgar square. I was particularly interested to see the winners of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize, which unfortunately ended its run two days ago, on the 15th of February. You can still see some of the winning images on the web site and I wrote of some of my thoughts on this exhibit on my own blog.

Along side the Taylor Wessing exhibit, is the Champions series of sports portraits, which will be on display until the 8th of March. These are very striking nudes of athletes at the top of their field, very well lit and composed. The motivation behind the collection is to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS and the portraits are described as ‘These people have the most amazing physicality, but despite this they are as vulnerable to HIV and AIDS as the rest of humanity, and hence the nudity becomes symbolic of this. We want to make them icons of a different sort with this work.’

The portrait gallery has a vast collection of historical portraits of significant figures in British history, from the 17th century to the present day. My wife and I spent a couple of hours viewing that collection, using the excellent audio guide. If you have the chance and are interested in photographic portraiture, you could do worse than spend some time looking at the composition and lighting employed by many master painters. This is a great place to do this.