The London-based photographer David Stewart has won the 2015 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. This year is the 16th time he has had a photograph selected for the annual exhibition.
Stewart’s winning entry, Five Girls 2014, (pictured above) is a restaging of a 2008 photograph of the same girls which was exhibited in the 2008 Taylor Wessing show. The original photo showed them prior to taking their GCSEs; the new version shows them after graduating from university.
Said Stewart: “I have always had a fascination with the way people interact – or, in this case, fail to interact, which inspired the photograph of this group of girls.
“While the girls are physically very close and their style and clothing highlight their membership of the same peer group, there is an element of distance between them.”
Other awards
The second prize of £3000 has been awarded to Anoush Abrar’s photograph of a young boy, Hector, inspired by Caravaggio’s painting Sleeping Cupid; third prize (£2000) has gone to to Peter Zelewski’s photograph, Nyaueth, of a woman on Oxford Street.
The £1000 fourth prize went to Ivor Prickett for his photograph of a displaced Iraqi family who had fled their Isis-controlled village near Mosul.
The £5,000 John Kobal New Work Award was won by Tereza Červeňová for her portrait of a friend, Yngvild.
The competition was judged from original prints by Dr Nicholas Cullinan, director, National Portrait Gallery; Dr Phillip Prodger, head of photographs, National Portrait Gallery; Hannah Starkey, photographer; Anne Lyden, international photography curator, Scottish National Portrait Gallery; David Drake, director, Ffotogallery, Cardiff; and Tim Eyles, managing partner, Taylor Wessing LLP.
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2015 exhibition is at The National Portrait Gallery, London, 12 November 2015 – 21 February 2016. npg.org.uk/photoprize
