The Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize 2014

Currently, the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize 2014 exhibition is travelling round the country from the National Portrait Gallery in London. From May to August it has been on show at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield.

Before I visited the exhibition, I decided not to do any research about any of the work being shown. I'm glad I did this as I think I appreciated the work more seeing it firsthand rather than on a screen for the first time. 

The exhibition was set out in one room, but with walls separating the work. Some similar work was grouped together, but it was mainly a mixture of different themes. The prize winners were spread out around the exhibition so you didn't know what you were going to come to next. All of the work was portraiture, but was a mixture between studio and location work. I think I preferred the location work to the studio photographs as I think that the backgrounds and objects used in location shoots make the image more interesting than a plain background in a studio.

One of my favourite images was actually the second prize winner.

The photograph is titled "Skate Girl" by Jessica Fulford-Dobson and is part of her Skate Girls of Kabul series. Skateboarding is something I've always been interested in, so I was drawn in straight away to this photograph. It was unusual, for one to see a girl pictured with a skateboard, and two to see a girl of a different culture to the stereotypical American skaters, in particular wearing very different clothing. My boyfriend, who came to the exhibition with me, immediately recognised the photograph as being part of the Skateistan organisation, something which I hadn't heard of but am now very interested in finding more information about. A quote from the photographer alongside the work was: "The series reveals that Afghan girls are like any other girls in the world. What I loved about this girl, was how immaculately dressed and composed she was. The skate hall is a dusty, noisy place filled with laughter and yelps of excitement as the girls skateboard freely, up, down and around with their robes and scarves flying".

These are some more of the photographs that I really liked in the exhibition:

What I liked about this exhibition was that along with each piece, there was an explanation about the work which made it even more interesting. The photographs were exciting to look at without the background information, but I found the explanations added more to the work and helped me understand them more.

The photograph below was my other favourite image:

I loved the lighting and colours in this piece and smiled as soon as I saw it. The expression on the subject's face is really happy, and the colours add to the emotion of the piece. The photographer didn't stage the photograph, apart from asking the subject to sit in the chair positioned in front of the camera. 

Overall, I really enjoyed the exhibition and found it particularly helpful reading the background information behind the works. They added meaning to the photographs and helped me see that sometimes project ideas can be really simple. For example, one piece was from a project about twins, and another an inheritance project, where the subject was dressed in her mother's clothes.