I’ve been keeping this quiet for a little while, but today I can finally share some rather wonderful news.
My portrait, Body Like Mine, has been selected for exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026, from 5 November 2026 to 17 January 2027.
It still feels slightly surreal to write that.
Before I became a photographer, I spent many years working in museums, so having one of my own portraits selected to be shown at the National Portrait Gallery feels particularly special.
About the portrait
Body Like Mine is a portrait of Meg, and it comes from the part of my work that sits somewhere between portraiture and the nude.
The title is important to me because the photograph is not really about an idealised body. It is about inhabiting your own body and being able to see it as something worthy of attention without asking it to become anything else first.
That idea runs through much of my work. Giving the person being photographed some authorship over how they are seen. That matters particularly in boudoir and nude photography, where bodies have so often been photographed according to somebody else’s ideas about beauty, desirability or what they should look like.
For me, the photograph is less about looking at a body and more about recognising a person within it.
The image shared here is a crop of the full portrait. You’ll have to visit the exhibition to see Meg in all their glory.
From museums to making portraits
There is something rather lovely about this particular photograph finding its way into a museum.
My museum background has never really left my photography. I’m still interested in many of the same questions I was interested in then. Representation, beauty, identity, the gaze, and what happens when an image is put out into the world for other people to look at.
Photography has just given me another way of exploring them.
And perhaps most importantly, it lets me explore those ideas with the person in front of my camera, rather than simply looking at them from the outside.
National Portrait Gallery 2026 exhibition
The Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026 will be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London from 5 November 2026 to 17 January 2027. The annual prize celebrates contemporary photographic portraiture and brings together work by emerging and established photographers.
I’ll add details about the exhibition here once they have been formally announced by the National Portrait Gallery.
For now, I’m enormously proud of the photograph, very grateful to Meg for making it with me, and more than a little excited to see it hanging there.
If you’d like to see more of my work, you can explore my portrait photography in London, including creative portraiture, and artistic boudoir photography.