The National Portrait Gallery has named Katie Hitchcock-Smith the winner of the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026, formerly known as the Taylor Wessing Prize for Photography. Her picture, Moroccan (Amazigh) Cowboys, comes from the series Tajine Westerns. It wins her £15,000.
Max Pattenden took second prize of £3,000 for Havannah, Lee Moor. James Clifford Kent won third prize of £2,000 for Neisser, Pinar del Río, Cuba. Marcie Docherty received the Winston Taylor Photographic Commission, worth £8,000, for her group portrait PE. The winning works are now on show in the prize exhibition.
The judges were the broadcaster and author Emma Dabiri, photographers Nadine Ijewere and Mary McCartney, and Brandei Estes, the gallery’s Senior Curator of Photographs.
Hitchcock-Smith grew up in Boston. She is an explorer, writer and photographer, and her trips have taken her from the North Pole to the Peruvian Amazon. She wants to know how people behave in harsh, dangerous places. Largely self-taught, she rejects the documentary approach. Her pictures are staged and carefully shaped. They offer a romantic view of travel and use pop culture to question the spread of globalisation.
The winning image was made during a residency near Erfoud in eastern Morocco. She befriended the sitters, Nour and Mohmed, and proposed a Western-themed shoot. She brought a cowboy hat from home. A jacket and a tent came from a local market.
Mohmed leans back against a camel, smoking and glancing over his shoulder. He could pass for John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. Nour holds the scene together in a white T-shirt, leather boots and Levi’s. Over them hangs an Amazigh marriage blanket fastened with a French colonial chain. The whole thing looks like a polished cigarette advert, and she admits she meant it to, with a nod to the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel. The camel, the dunes and the blanket break the spell. So does the nod to Spaghetti Westerns, those 1960s films about American myths that were directed, acted and shot in Italy. The result is playful and knowing, a transcultural remix of visual stereotypes.
Havannah, Lee Moor by Max Pattenden from the series Men May Come and Men May Go, But I Go On Forever, 2025 © Max Pattenden Second Prize
Pattenden is 24 and based in the South West of England. His work looks at time, identity and landscape. He shot fashion marketing on film before starting a degree in photography at the University of Plymouth in 2022. In his second year, he joined the gallery’s Photo Portrait Now project, run in partnership with his university. Photobooks drive his storytelling. Matthew Genitempo, Mimi Plumb, Kristine Potter and Bryan Schutmaat inform his thinking, and the Devon photographer Sian Davey has mentored him.
His portrait shows ten-year-old Havannah. He found her village, Lee Moor, while driving out of Plymouth in search of fog. The community grew around china clay pits opened almost 200 years ago. The landscape on the edge of Dartmoor looks lunar. He attended events at the village hall and gradually earned the trust. Residents began to share their stories. At a Halloween party, he met Havannah and her family. Struck by her timeless look, he asked to photograph her around the village. He made the picture at the end of a cold day. Her expression is hard to name. She looks away, intense and thoughtful, and the viewer is held.
Neisser, Pinar del Río, Cuba by James Clifford Kent 2025 © James Clifford Kent Third Prize
Born in South London, photographer James Clifford Kent was drawn to images from a young age, intrigued by the artform’s ability to access the blurred spaces between fantasy and reality. Kent has spent the last 20 years transfixed by storytelling in Cuba, where he began using photography to document his time there while teaching at the University of Havana in his 20s. Entirely self-taught, he credits the black-and-white post-revolutionary Cuban photo books he had access to as his guide to photography.
Winston Taylor Photographic Commission £8,000: Marcie Docherty
Docherty studied at the BRIT School and Central Saint Martins. As a child, she recreated a Raymond Carver cover pose with her father, then developed the negatives with him in a makeshift darkroom. That taught her that portraiture is an act of construction. PE belongs to her ongoing series In Pursuit of Muscle, which examines how masculinity is built and performed.
Four men in American football gear stand before a plain suburban building. The jerseys and helmets recall high school sport, but something is off. Wrestling shorts replace football trousers. Polished leather shoes sit above athletic socks. The ordinary street refuses to play along. She works on analogue film and draws on staged and vernacular photography, shaped by her interest in archives and their social histories. The picture is not a parody. It shows an identity assembled from aspiration, imitation, and performance, and suggests that masculinity is never fixed.
Winston Taylor Photographic Commission 2025 winner: Hollie Fernando
The exhibition will also unveil a new portrait by Hollie Fernando, who won the commission in 2025. It shows the darts champion Luke Littler at home. He sits on a sofa in casual sportswear with his French bulldog between his feet. Known as The Nuke, Littler became the youngest PDC World Darts Champion in 2025 and defended the title in 2026. Here he looks relaxed and unassuming, a long way from the tension of the oche.
Victoria Siddall, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, congratulated the winners. She said their work explores collective and individual identity with thought and creativity. Shane Gleghorn, Winston Taylor’s Europe and Middle East Managing Partner, said the firm is marking nineteen years of backing the prize.
Top Photo: 1st Prize Moroccan (Amazigh) Cowboys by Katie Hitchcock-Smith from the series Tajine Westerns, 2025 © Katie Hitchcock-Smith