The winners’ exhibition of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize is, unsurprisingly, the fruit of compromise. The 60 works shown were selected from 6,300 submissions from photographers worldwide. The award’s judges aimed to select prints showing the skill of the photographers rather than sophisticated technical photo-manipulation. The winning works seem to achieve this perfectly. Portraits of an adolescent swimmer by Paul Floyd Blake and of a Georgian girl in a golden dress by Vanessa Winship show careful use of light and space around the sitter.

Terence Pepper, curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery as well as the judge of the award, aims to use the prize to gain more prestige for the medium of photography in the gallery context. This purpose seems to influence his choices, as in the case of artists who allude directly to Old Master paintings such as Mirjana Vrbaski and Steven Barritt. It is also central to the curatorial decisions. An imposing reproduction of a portrait of an anonymous girl by Vrbaski, Dutch-like in style, is visible from the main space in the ground floor, as if trying to steal viewers from the main section of the gallery.

Apart from this, it was clearly difficult to create a consistent show from photographs varying from intimate family portraits to photo-journalistic images of war and cataclysm. Such is the nature of an open contest. Inevitably the display is varied with some prints placed in an unfortunate position. Such a treatment of the winning material raises the question whether and to what extent photography should compete with portrait painting. It seems that emphasising properties of the medium, such as immediacy and objectivity, would be more effective than attempts to recreate the conventions of the Old Masters.

Until Feb 14

JAKUB KOGUCIUK