Photo Gallery: Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010

The winner of the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Prize was announced yesterday, and as with most prizes you know there must be an element of compromise when it comes to selecting the shortlist. David Chancellor’s winning portrait of a 14-year-old game hunter from Alabama, mounted on a horse with a dead buck draped across its neck (2), is certainly striking. So too, are the second and third prize-winners - the second, Portrait of My British Wife by Panayiotis Lamprou (9), doubly so, since it reveals more than one might expect to see in the context of this annual award.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Stockbridge’s Tic Tac and Tootsie(8), an image of homeless twin sisters in Philadelphia, is equally revealing, capturing both hardness and vulnerability in limp, apathetic young bodies. But it’s harder to make a case for Abbie Trayler-Smith’s rather ordinary image of a plump teenager (5), which won fourth prize. And so you wonder how Tom Martin’s teenage prisoners in Burundi, cramped inside a cell glowing sulphurish orange, could have been overlooked (you can almost smell the fetid cell, and the accompanying scent of despair). And one is equally arrested by Steven Barritt’s self-portrait (4), taken in a bedroom almost as sweatily oppressive as the African prison, and decorated wall-to-wall with magazine cut-outs of Britney Spears.

Still, the standard is exceptionally high for this diverse photographic portrait prize and the award truly does appear to go from strength to strength.

Click an image below to enter gallery.

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1. Ian Atkinson, Mr Streames from the series The Reflective Moment
2. David Chancellor, Huntress with Buck from the series Hunters
3. Tom Martin, Child Prisoners, Ruyigi District Prison, Burundi from the series Prisoner, Burundi
4. Steven Barrittt, Untitled from the series Analogous Mythography
5. Abbie Trayler-Smith, Untitled 2, part of an ongoing series
6. Thomas Butler, Jon and Anne from the series Guardian Weekend, Politicians and Press
7. Jeanette Lowe, Beach Boys
8. Jeffrey Stockbridge, Tic Tac and Tootsie (twin sisters Carroll and Shelly Mckean) from the series Nowhere but Here
9. Panayiotis Lamprou, Portrait of My British Wife, from the series Human Presence
10. Bar Am-David, Soldier Number 1 from the series Portraits of Jaffa

• Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery until 20 February, 2011
• Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize reviewed on theartsdesk