Taylor Wessing Prize at NPG

An answer to painting?

As I started to write this must say I was rather surprised to find that it's about 3 years since I went to see the winners of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait competition at London's National Portrait Gallery.

The good news is that I think the quality this year  is even higher than before and the subjects yet more engaging.


Goodness how the judges choose - technically they all brilliant to me - but the ones I especially liked were:

1) Fleeing Mosul by Abbie Trayler-Smith (it got second prize) despite the sad subject the work is beautiful and so painterly, the colours are out of this world.

2) Minecrafting by Hania Farrell is another photograph that really did it for me, what was great about this one was the way it referenced works like the recently viewed (by me)  Velasquez's Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (also seen last year).

And the third picture (and a big part of the reason I made the journey into town) was the really exciting...

3) 'One of them is a Human..' by Maija Tammi - what's so exceptional about this is that it's a portrait of Erica (an android) - Tammi is a Finnish artist who has worked and studied in America as well as Finland.

The idea of taking pictures of an Android seems almost a visual 'Turing test' and alerts us to issues that will become more and more applicable as technology progresses.

To be honest the visit to this exhibition really livened me up and made me enthusiastic to make more photographic  experiments myself.

[I was also intrigued by how many of the Portraits' had the subject so centrally]