Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010: The Great, The Ordinary and The Questionable

This year’s selection of portraits on display at Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Award Exhibition was indeed really good but the photographs winning the first and second prize were disappointing.

The wining portrait, the beautifully composed and lit but nothing out of the ordinary ‘Huntress with Buck’ by David Chancellor, and second prize winner: the somewhat controversial and questionable ‘Portrait of My British Wife’ by Panayiotis Lamprou (already renamed ‘Portrait of My British Wife’s Vagina’) were far less interesting compared to Jeffrey Stockbridge’s ‘Tic Tac and Tootsie’ that took the third prize and was by far the most captivating portrait in the exhibition.

Stockbridge’s photograph of the twin sisters Carroll and Shelly McKean (who were kicked out of their home at nineteen and subsequently turned to drugs and prostitution and life on the streets of Philadelphia) was simply arresting. Their limber postures and the resigned yet steely look in their eyes combined with the premature ageing from living rough showing on their faces, tell a story that has a universal appeal to it; a story of poverty and living under hard conditions that could have been captured in any big city of our broken world. Not much explanation necessary.

But in the end it is all down to personal taste and the question of what makes a good portrait. Personally I go by ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.


The exhibition is on until 20 February 2010 at National Portrait Gallery