The National Portrait Gallery is currently showing the winners of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize, an annual portrait competition (that everyone can submit to, so remember that! The competition for 2012 opens next spring). Though I wonder how some of the shortlisted images are supposed to be the best of over 6000 entries, there where some really good portraits (like the winning guinea pig portrait above by Jooney Woodward) and the exhibition (as well as the rest of the collection at NPG) is well worth having a look at, not only because there is a portrait of Kiera Knightley that shows that she's actually human and has wrinkles (which sometimes is hard to believe looking at all those glossy Chanel ads, but because one of your tasks is to take a portrait and I find it hard to believe that there would be any other place where you could find such a wide variety of portraits of all mediums - there's not only paintings and photographs, go there and see yourself what other ways there is to portray a person.
The Taylor Wessing competition has become a quite big event and intrestingly an other competition has popped up in the shadow of it. Portrait Salon is a competition for entries rejected by the Taylor Wessing Photographic prize. The exhibition showcases 75 rejected entries and opens tomorrow at Roxy Bar and Screen at 128-132 Borough High Street, SE1 1LB. Gonna go and check out that for sure!
