Katie Hitchcock-Smith has won the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026, the National Portrait Gallery’s annual photography award, with a picture of Amazigh horsemen in the Moroccan desert. The result was announced on November 3, and the winning image now hangs in the prize exhibition at the gallery in London.
The award, which comes with £15,000, is the first under the Winston Taylor name. For years the competition was known as the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, and it remains one of the most closely watched contests in portrait photography.
The winning picture
Hitchcock-Smith’s photograph, Moroccan (Amazigh) Cowboys (2025), comes from her series Tajine Westerns, made during a residency near Erfoud, on the edge of the Sahara in eastern Morocco. The series title is a play on the “spaghetti western,” and the pictures borrow the look of cowboy cinema to portray the Amazigh men who live and ride in the region, recasting a genre that usually leaves people like them at the margins.
The other prizewinners
Second prize, worth £3,000, went to Max Pattenden for Havannah, Lee Moor, from a series with the long, wistful title Men May Come and Men May Go, But I Go On Forever (2025). Third prize of £2,000 went to James Clifford Kent for Neisser, Pinar del Río, Cuba, from his series Yuma (2025).
Marcie Docherty received the Winston Taylor Photographic Commission, worth £8,000, for PE, part of her series In Pursuit of Muscle (2026).
The shortlist was announced in August. This year’s judges were the writer and broadcaster Emma Dabiri, the photographers Nadine Ijewere and Mary McCartney, and Brandei Estes, the gallery’s senior curator of photographs.
Why the prize matters
The competition is an open call, so first-time entrants compete alongside established professionals, and its exhibition is one of the National Portrait Gallery’s most popular each year. Unlike many photography awards, it judges single images rather than portfolios, which tends to reward pictures that can hold a room on their own.
The 2026 results also reflect a broader turn in contemporary portraiture. Three of the four prizewinning images come from long-form series rooted in specific places: a Moroccan desert town, a Devon village and a Cuban province. It is portrait photography as documentary storytelling rather than the studio headshot.
The prize exhibition is on show at the National Portrait Gallery on St Martin’s Place, near Trafalgar Square.