5340 submissions showing the work of 2350 photographers, and a winner was chosen.  Spanish-born, London-based photographer Jordi Ruiz Cirera's image of Margerita, a young Bolivian woman living in a religious community, won the 28-year old the overall prize, worth a total of £12,000.  Margerita found the process of taking the picture troubling, even though she sits behind a table, her face partially obscured by a hand placed casually before it.

This is one of sixty portraits in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, which is open at the National Portrait Gallery for another month.  It is an opportunity to see exciting work by some of the most captivating and challenging photographers today.  There are images here from advertising, editorial and the fine arts and balanced smattering of interesting faces, interesting stories and contemporary icons.

There are wonderfully evocative portraits of Gillian Wearing and Mo Farah, and there is the image below. This picture of Chinese dissident/activist/artist Ai Weiwei won Matthew Niederhauser the John Kobal New Work award, an adjunct prize given to an outstanding photographic artist under the age of 30.  The very notion of celebrity was born from painting and portraiture, so this exhibition feels delightfully relevant.  Well worth your time.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize is at the National Portrait Gallery until 17 February

Header image: “Harriet and Gentleman Jack” (2010) by Jooney Woodward © Jooney Woodward

Second image: © Matthew Niederhauser

Women of London, the time is now!  Dorothy Bohm, the Grand Dame of photography, celebrates the female half of the capital in her exhibition Women in Focus, currently on display at the Museum of London.

Thirty-three colour photographs, taken between 1990 and the present day, juxtapose images of women from advertising and artworks with women living and working in the capital.  These images present the many roles of the modern woman, and provide a serious yet playful reflection on how women are seen and how they present themselves.  Bohm’s skills are to subtly weigh the contrasts with the discrepancies of the ideal with the reality.

Born in East Prussia (roughly modern-day Poland), and resident in England since 1939 at the age of fifteen, Dorothy Bohm is one of the most significant of all female photographers, with a career spanning almost seventy years.  She helped set up London’s Photographers’ Gallery and recently exhibited at Tate Britain in the show Another London.  She says, “I have been called a humanist photographer in my life.  As a woman photographing women, I hope that I have shown in my pictures that I understand, sympathise and can identify with my subjects.  I never want to take hurtful pictures…Some photographs could only have been taken by a woman.”

Women in Focus: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm is at the Museum of London until 17 February.

Women in Focus: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm is at the Museum of London until 17 February.

Where would contemporary art be without Cindy Sherman, or any of her gang from the Pictures Generation of the 1980s?  Lost, is probably the answer.  Sprüth Magers welcome in the new year with a group show, led by the genius photographer herself, and containing supporting works by Bruce Nauman, Georges Bataille, Hans Bellmer, Frederick Sommer, Bangwa Tribal Sculpture and Morton Bartlett.

As the title might suggest, The Vivisector mightn’t be an entirely pleasant affair (with yesterday’s post, there seems to be an air of transgression floating around London at the moment…)  There are two bodies of work by Sherman on display here.  The first are her famous Sex Pictures (1989-1992), in which she explores the body through the use of mannequins and prosthetics.  The second is a series called Broken Dolls (1999), which depict figurines that have been disassembled and reconstructed by the artist.

Vivisection is, essentially, dissection of a living object for the purposes of pathological investigation.  The curatorial elements are slightly unsubtle, but that’s probably to be expected for such a show.  It’s definitely worth a visit, because any show of Cindy’s in town is one worth seeing.  Despite its attempt at body-shock-horror, there’s always that brief moment of respite in Sherman’s work where the memory of erotics linger on.

The Vivisector is at Sprüth Magers until 26 January.