Portrait of Teenage Hunter Wins Top Photo Prize

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 has been won by David Chancellor, 49, for his portrait, Huntress with Buck, of 14 year old Josie Slaughter from Alabama on her first hunting trip to South Africa. He says ‘Josie had hunted her buck earlier in the day and was returning to camp. As we arrived, the sun set below the cloud cover and I had almost unreal light for around a minute. The contrast between the peace and tranquillity of the location, plus Josie’s ethereal beauty and the dead buck, was what I wanted to explore. Here was a vulnerability and yet also a strength.’

The £12,000 award was presented to Chancellor at the National Portrait Gallery, London, last night (Tuesday 9 November). The portrait is from his project documenting hunters, the hunted and spaces associated with hunting. He says ‘As a child I was fascinated by the tales of Colonel Jim Corbett hunting man-eating tigers in India. As an art student it was Peter Beard's seminal work The End of the Game that fascinated and inspired. This work will seek to explore the intricate and complex relationship between man and animals and how both struggle to adapt to their changing environments’.

Chancellor spent two days with the 14 year old and her family, shooting Kodak 160VC 120 film on a Mamiya 7 II camera. The painterly quality of light is a striking component of Chancellor’s winning entry. ‘I’ve always been interested in Africa; it’s impossible not to be inspired by the place,’ he says. ‘Once you are bitten by the continent you never recover. And for an artist or photographer, the light is indescribable.’ While Chancellor acknowledges that hunting is an emotive subject, he stresses the importance of remaining objective in his reportage. ‘The aim is always to be detached’, he says. ‘In reality that’s rarely possible, but I do hope I can observe without an agenda and without the necessity to shout.’

Born in Solihull in 1961, Chancellor inherited his interest in photography from his father, a keen amateur and started taking photographs of his boyhood passions: wildlife and motorsport. After an unfulfilling early career in banking, he studied photography at Kent Institute of art and Design. Now based in both London and Cape Town, he shoots documentary reportage and portraiture for a range of clients and regularly works on projects for Non-Governmental Organisations. Named Nikon Press Photographer of the Year three times, he also received a World Press Photo Award earlier this year and a study of his wife and son was exhibited in last year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.

The following artists have also been commended in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 and receive the following prizes:

£3,000 Second Prize: Panayiotis Lamprou for Portrait of my British wife from the series Human Presence

£2,000 Third Prize: Jeffrey Stockbridge for Tic Tac and Tootsie (twin sisters Carroll and Shelly McKean) from the series Nowhere but Here

£1,000 Fourth Prize Abbie Trayler-Smith for Untitled 2 from the series Childhood Obesity