Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize

© Paul Floyd Blake, Rosie Bancroft, 2008

If success begets success then the latest incarnation of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 at The National Portrait Gallery is no exception. Strong, varied and utterly captivating, the show presents the very best in contemporary portrait photography. Featuring students' work alongside established photographers, the competition is democratic at heart, and this year attracted over 2,400 photographers who submitted more than 6,300 images.

First prize was awarded to Paul Floyd Blake for his shortlisted portrait Rosie Bancroft, 2009 from an ongoing project entitled On Track for 2012. Shot with a large format 5x4 field camera, the head on image shows a young athlete who has the potential to complete in the 2012 Olympics despite having her right foot removed when she was ten months old. The sitters' posture is at once powerful yet tender, the lighting delicate and the composition carefully considered.

Speaking about the wider project the photographer says, "The series is probably less about sport than it is about young people growing up and the transition from childhood into adulthood. These teenagers exist in this ultra-professional world that can often be very isolating. It is about them growing up and how the experiences they have now shape them for the future."

Elsewhere, Vanessa Winship (who I have already featured here), scooped second prize for Girl in a Golden Dress, Georgia, 2009 from the series Georgia Song. Winship is the queen of the poetic portrait and her chosen photograph was taken on one of several trips to Georgia where she was searching for people who somehow reflected the contemporary ethos of the country. "I found this particular young girl in the capital, Tbilisi, at one of the Palaces of Marriage," she said. "I liked the delicacy of her features and the way she held herself in what looked like a new and best outfit."

Other prize winners included Michal Chelbin (Murder, Juvenile Prison, Russia 2009 from the series Locked) whose quiet but terse portrait depicts Stas, a fifteen-year-old boy who is an inmate at a high security prison in Russia and Mijana Vrbaski's more immediate and striking Girl, a photograph of anonymous girl taken in June 2009 in Netherlands.

Through an alluring mix of editorial, advertising and fine art photography, the competition broaches an equally broad range of themes, styles and subjects from the commissioned portrait to the more spontaneous family snapshot. Clearly, contemporary portraiture is very much alive and kicking and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize provides a unique opportunity to see some of the most exciting and inspiring work from photography's current cream of the crop.

The exhibition has unfortunately closed now at National Portrait Gallery but there is still time to catch at the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead from 27 March to 6 June 2010 and The Art Gallery Walsall from 16 July to 12 September 2010. The exhibition tour is organised by the National Portrait Gallery.

This article was originally published as a news story in the February issue of a-n magazine www.a-n.co.uk

Dean Hollowood

All images ©Dean Hollowood

These are a few images that Dean Hollowood submitted from his lovely little project Still Closer. The work, he says, is "informed by a long period of hearing loss and is a reflection of life viewed through the minutia of my domestic surroundings."

He kindly fills in the details and explained further:

"Ten years ago I was diagnosed with a degenerative middle ear disease. My hearing gradually deteriorated to the point where I could no longer recognise sounds outside my immediate environment. This had a profound effect on my physical and psychological outlook. Silence changes the way you look at the world, it enables us to observe and reflect without being disturbed. More importantly the work is an expression of the emotional response to silence encompassing notions of melancholy, isolation and humour.

Shot in landscape I reference cinematic psychodramas, each study is initiated through chance, part snapshot part staged. Focusing on the sculptural and abstract, and paying particular attention to colour I exploit the available light to fetishise the subject through the act of photography."

Dean studied at St Martins and went on to work in editorial and design, clients included the charity Shelter along with the Guardian and Sunday Times Magazines. More recently he has focused on self initiated projects and have exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, John Kobal Exhibition prize winner, The Lowry Centre, Salford and Four Corners Gallery in Bethnal Green. The project Still Closer was awarded the jurors choice prize at the 2008 Santa Fe Review project competition, and is about to be exhibited as part of the Format Festival, Photocinema in Derby.

Vanessa Winship-Sweet Nothings @HOST Gallery, London

Vanessa Winship and I have been in contact a lot recently in the run up to her eagerly anticipated show Sweet Nothings at HOST gallery which opens this Tuesday. I´m just so excited about seeing this work in a gallery and feel compelled to spread the word about her fantastic project. Her photographs of rural schoolgirls from the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia,Turkey are simply stunning so what better way to help illuminate her imagery than have her discuss it. I´ll hand over to Vanessa now. She explains:

“I wanted to make a series of portraits of these girls on the borderlands. Knowing their status I wanted to give a small space for these small girls to have a moment of importance in front of the camera. I hoped the symbol of the uniform, the distance in repetition, and the austerity of the landscape would represent one thing, but I also hoped that in the expressions of the girls’ faces to draw attention to the idea of these young girls poised at the moment “just before”, The moment where possibility lies, a time where the presentation of self teeters into consciousness.”

Vanessa studied Film, Video and Photographic arts at the Polytechnic of Central London. She has lived and worked in the Balkans and Turkey for almost a decade. In her imagery she focuses on the junction between fiction and reality, exploring ideas around the concepts of border, land, memory, identity and history. She is interested in how stories are told.

Her work has been recognised internationally: She is the recipient of two first prize World Press Photo Awards. In 2008 she received the Godfrey Argent prize at the annual Portrait Award from the National Portrait Gallery, London. She is current holder of the Iris D’or, Photographer of the Year, from the Sony World Photography Awards. In 2008 she was invited to show Sweet Nothings at the Rencontres D’Arles festival of photography in France. Mare published her first book, The Black Sea, in 2007. Sweet Nothings is published by Foto8.

Reading from the foreward of the book, here is Max Houghton´s lovely, poetic description of the work:

“As we linger over Vanessa Winship’s photographs of rural schoolgirls in Eastern Anatolia, it is as though a thousand faces appear, from generations past, present and future. The face of this child’s grandmother, that child’s sister, the faces of their children’s children, faces from our own childhood, faces from the work of Arbus, Mark or Disfarmer, faces from a fairytale, faces we know and faces we could never comprehend. We are disturbed by their proximity, we mourn their distance.”

I´ll be heading to the private view this Thursday evening around 6 so hope to catch you all there!






















©Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Sweet Nothings
HOST Gallery
3 February — 5 March 2009