It is an image of stillness in an increasingly chaotic world: a young woman sits in a park, immersed in nature and music. And it has caught the mood of the times, becoming the winner of the 2023 Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait prize.
Judges awarded Alexandre Silberman the prestigious £15,000 prize for his picture Diena, which was taken in Paris’s La Courneuve Park. The winning portrait forms part of Silberman’s series Nature, which explores the intersection of human interventions and the natural world. Judges praised the image for its blend of the traditional and the contemporary, juxtaposing historical depictions of a Madonna with modern signifiers such as the sitter’s nose ring and headphones. The titular Diena, sitting for her first ever professional photograph, is wearing a floral blouse which appears to blend in with the park’s surrounding lawn.
Born in Dortmund, Germany, Silberman is a director, cinematographer and photographer based in Paris. He said he first spotted Diena sitting in the sun as he was walking through the park. “What I first noticed, apart from the softness of her expression and the way her face took the light extremely well, was a more imposing element around her. Her suitcase, her large bouquet of red flowers, her large white veil falling on the ground.”
Silberman was almost out of film when he took his winning image. “I decided to take a close-up of Diena, concentrating on her face, but also on her blouse. The vegetation was no longer what Diena was standing on, but Diena herself. This gives the portrait a mystical power, accentuated by her very inner expression and the dropping of the veil.”
A second prize of £3,000 was awarded to Gilleam Trapenberg, an Amsterdam-based photographer born on the Dutch-Caribbean Island of Curaçao. His portrait Kisha and LaDarayon, taken from the series Currents, shows a heartfelt moment between mother and son, captured on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.
Two third prizes of £2,000 were also handed out. British photographer Jake Green impressed the judges with his portrait of Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder, whose face is obscured by a plume of smoke the frontman has exhaled. Judges praised the way the sitter’s character comes across, despite the fact his face is not revealed. Carl Francois van der Linde’s portrait Chotu Lal Upside-down was taken from the South African photographer’s series Our Leader. In the image a professional wrestler from Punjab hangs upside down by his feet from a tree, sandwiched between two much larger wrestlers – a ritual humiliation that wrestlers sometimes go through in order to build their brand on social media platforms and attract attention from talent agents.
This year’s award ceremony also featured the inaugural Taylor Wessing Photographic Commission, won by Serena Brown for her warm family portrait entitled me nana fie. Depicting the British photographer’s younger sister, who was visiting Ghana for the first time, it forms part of a larger project in which Brown captures the characters – from friends to street sellers – who visit her grandmother’s home in Accra.
The winning portraits will go on display as part of the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait prize 2023 exhibition, which returns to the National Portrait Gallery for the first time in three years after renovation work. The exhibition features 58 portraits from 51 photographers, selected for display by a panel of judges including National Portrait Gallery’s director Dr Nicholas Cullinan, senior curator at the Photographer’s Gallery Karen McQuaid and artist Campbell Addy. The exhibition will run from 9 November to 25 February.
Cullinan congratulated this year’s winners, saying that the prize “represents the very best of contemporary photographic talent, showcasing the array of unique perspectives and styles at work in the discipline today. It’s wonderful to see the prize and exhibition return to the National Portrait Gallery after three years, and to share these fantastic portraits with our visitors.”
