London's National Portrait Gallery has announced its 2025 programme which includes several exhibitions of photographic note. First up, in spring is The Face Magazine: Culture Shift (20 February - 18 May 2025). The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates iconic fashion images and portraits from The Face, a trail-blazing youth culture and style magazine that has shaped the creative and cultural landscape in Britain and beyond. From 1980 to 2004, The Face played a vital role in creating contemporary culture. Musicians featured on its covers achieved global success and the models it championed – including a young Kate Moss – became the most recognisable faces of their time. The magazine also launched the careers of many leading photographers and fashion stylists, who were given the creative freedom to radically reimagine the visual language of fashion photography and define the spirit of their times. Relaunched in 2019, the magazine continues to provide a disruptive and creative space for image-makers, championing fresh talent in photography, fashion, music and graphic design. This exhibition will bring together the work of over 80 photographers, including Sheila Rock, Stéphane Sednaoui, Corinne Day, David Sims, Elaine Constantine and Sølve Sundsbø, and will feature over 200 photographs – a unique opportunity to see many of these images away from the magazine page for the first time.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is curated by Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, together with Curatorial Consultants Lee Swillingham, former Art Director of The Face from 1992 to 1999, and Norbert Schoerner, a photographer whose work featured in the magazine throughout the Nineties and Noughties. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same name, with contributions from Ekow Eshun, Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Jamie Morgan, Pete Paphides and Matthew Whitehouse, and interviews between Nick Logan and Lee Swillingham; Neville Brody, Jill Furmanovsky and Sheila Rock; Elaine Constantine, Glen Luchford and Nancy Rohde; and Norbert Schoerner and Stéphane Sednaoui.
In the autumn Robin Muir has curated Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World (9 October 2025 - 11 January 2026). Renowned as a fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, social caricaturist and writer, Cecil Beaton – ‘The King of Vogue’ – was an extraordinary force in the 20th century British and American creative scenes. Elevating fashion and portrait photography into an art form, his era-defining photographs captured beauty, glamour, and star power in the interwar and early post-war eras. No previous exhibition has exclusively spotlighted his ground-breaking fashion work, a pivotal aspect of his career that laid the foundation for his later successes. With this in mind, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World will showcase Beaton at his most triumphant – from the Jazz Age and the Bright Young Things, to the high fashion brilliance of the Fifties and the glittering, Oscar-winning success of My Fair Lady. In between, he endured the hardship of war as a photographer of the home front and of the Western Desert campaign and beyond. From 1939 as a royal photographer, by appointment to the House of Windsor, he propelled the monarchy into the modern age.
Curated by Robin Muir, a Contributing Editor to British Vogue (to which Beaton himself contributed for over fifty years), this new exhibition will chart Beaton’s rapid progression through the fashionable worlds of film, art and couture, influenced in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood by the fast-moving pace of metropolitan life. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, by Robin Muir.
November also sees the rteurn of the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize exhibition (13 November-8 February 2026) and a new commission.The TWPPP showcases the work of talented young photographers, gifted amateurs and established professionals in the very best of contemporary photography. The competition celebrates a diverse range of images and tells the fascinating stories behind the creation of works, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family. The selected images, many of which are on display for the first time, explore both traditional and contemporary approaches to the photographic portrait whilst capturing a range of characters, moods and locations. The annual In Focus display will also highlight new work by an established photographer. The 2025 edition will see the unveiling of a new commission for the Gallery’s Collection, to be announced in November 2024. A new publication, including all works exhibited as part of the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize, will be available from November 2025.
See: www.npg.org.uk
Images: L-R: Jazzie B (Soul II Soul) by Enrique Badulescu, April 1989 © Enrique Badulescu; Kate Moss by Glen Luchford, March 1993 © Glen Luchford. Styling Venetia Scott; NPG x40415. Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant, ‘Riviera Wanderers’ by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor, 1927 © reserved; collection National Portrait Gallery, London; The Second Age of Beauty by Cecil Beaton, British Vogue February 1946 © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Condé Nast Archive London.
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