Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize review: Great images in too small a show

The usual frustrations return - there are great works here, but the gathering is too broad
Yuki San and the series Hakanai Sonzai
© Pierre-Elie de Pibrac
Ben Luke9 November 2021

With the National Portrait Gallery closed until 2023 for its renovation, the Taylor Wessing prize is temporarily relocated to the new Cromwell Place gallery complex in South Kensington. The venue may be different but the prize has many of the same frustrations as in previous years – for all that there are some great images, it’s too broad a gathering of works in too small a show.

Photographers are asked to submit bodies of work as well as individual portraits. It often means that you’re left with a halfway house: there are 54 photographs here, by 25 artists, most of them from discrete series that we can only really glimpse. If you’re like me, you’ll spend a lot of time afterwards on Google.

For instance, we see just one photograph from Alexander Beer’s series depicting Dakota, a trans man, and just a single self-portrait by Kymara Akinpelumi, exploring hair as a fundamental aspect of her own image and central to Black identity more widely. The winner of the third prize this year is David by Katya Ilina, from a group of portraits that ruminates on masculinity, in this case framing a Black male sitter in the context of portraits of women from art history, referring directly to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. All three are dramatic on their own, but I wanted to see more.

David by Katya Ilina © Katya Ilina
© Katya Ilina

The other prize winners are at least represented by several images: we see four of David Prichard’s first prize winning photographs of “stock women”: Indigenous Australian people who worked on cattle ranches in Queensland, often in appalling conditions. They’re starkly lit portraits in interior spaces, and three of the four meet our gaze directly, and movingly. Prichard is clearly aware of the potential ethical issues of depicting them: he names the women and their Gkuthaarn and Kurtijar communities and stresses that he has “always been respectful of cultural and social sensitivities and subsequently built trust” with them. Short interviews with his sitters accompany the images, hinting at the hardships they endured, but, again, to truly reflect the series, more interpretation and context is needed.

Pierre-Elie de Pibrac’s group of six photographs from his Hakanai Sonzai series, winners of the second prize, are images of isolation and melancholy, taken of people still unable to return to their homes because of contamination from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and sitters from Yubari, a deprived former mining town. De Pibrac asked the sitters to think “a painful event in their lives”, he says, and it shows; there’s a cool beauty in these shots, but they’re unremittingly bleak.

The exhibition’s breadth does mean it captures the key issues of today, particularly what it means to grapple in photographic portraits with the effects of a pandemic. Tori Ferenc’s series reflects her own pregnancy and new motherhood amid Covid restrictions and Kois Miah’s Dad in Lockdown, made while living with his father for the first time in years, suggests all the intimacy, vulnerability and tension of that experience.

Cromwell Place, from Weds until Jan 2; npg.org.uk/photoprize

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