Photographic Portrait Prize 2007
The Lowry Centre, Salford
Until Sunday 12 October 2008

Almost 2,700 photographers entered the 2007 Prize, “some conventional, others more experimental”. However, the 60 or so photographs selected for this exhibition suggest the entries must have fallen almost exclusively into the “conventional” camp, ticking most or all of the following boxes: colour, posed, high production values, young, good looking subjects (or failing that, famous ones).

That the exhibtion contains few surprises doesn't mean it contains no excellent pictures. On the contrary, almost all have fairly obvious merit: Kalus Gerdes' Mother and Daughter is a beautiful juxtaposition of colour, age and attitude; Corrina Adams' Holly is bucolic perfection at sunset's golden hour; Guy Martin's Cossack Cadets have a casual, rock-star nonchalance; and Alan Powdrill's Playmate is disturbingly suggestive. And of course, a few of the entrants do manage to produce something a little out of the ordinary: Ewan McNichol's Beautiful Birds is a thoughtfully humorous; Dave Stewart's Alice and Fish is a playful return to surrealism, and a welcome counterpoint to the pretention which predominates; and Juan Pedro Trejo pulls off a very serious, intriguing and unsettling chiaroscuro portrait in Malena. However, with the possible exception of Billy and Hells' attempt to reproduce painterly effects with Sophia, all this hardly pushes the boundaries of photographic practice. Julia Fullerton-Batten's personal work may well be highly idiosyncratic, but the same can’t be said of her sumptuous glossy magazine shot of Amy Winehouse featured here.

As a group, these portraits suffer from the same wider malaise which afflicts the current photographic scene in general: for many, proper photography seems only to mean technically perfect medium format set ups featuring youth and beauty, possibly revealing their subjects' inner personality or feelings as well as the technical brilliance of the photographer. Walking through this display of perfectly executed pictures of expressionless children and emotionless adults, one has to wonder why “serious” photography nowadays covers such an incredibly narrow sliver of the medium's infinite possibilities.

If the purpose of the competition is to hold up a mirror to a staid contemporary photography scene, then it succeeds. But if it aims to show us something different, interesting or brave, then it largely fails. This could be blamed on the judges, but perhaps it is the photographers themselves who are at fault. “Safeness overwhelms...” one of the judges, Sue Stewart, writes in the exhibition catalogue. “The overwhelming sensation here was of talented young photographers preferring the security of working in established styles. Maybe next year will be a more radical appraisal of the times?”

We can only hope so.

Review by Simon Bowcock