I have never quite understood why the Mario Testino exhibition hit such a raw nerve. Kate Moss, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles, 1996. I occasionally think “The Man who showed Mario Testino” will be written on my grave. I remember a journalist taking me to one side and telling me that my reputation would never recover.
It was a way of reconnecting the National Portrait Gallery to a mass audience, and it was highly successful.īut something different happened when we opened the Mario Testino exhibition in February 2002. I remember the heady sense of being involved with a mass medium, helped by the fact that Princess Diana came out of her period of retreat from public appearances to open it (since it was supposed to be a private event I asked her if she would prefer to leave by the back door, but she said she’d rather face the massed paparazzi again).īut neither of these exhibitions caused any public controversy. It had previously been shown in Cologne and Milan. The following year we did a big retrospective of the work of Richard Avedon, one of the great, postwar American photographers. © Dennis Hopper, courtesy The Hopper Art Trust. She presented examples of her work to the permanent collection.Īndy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and Jeff Goodman, 1963. Nearly the first exhibition during my time there was the Annie Leibovitz, a show which consisted of carefully staged celebrity photography based on her work for American magazines, including Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. And photography was, and is, a mass medium with a different level of audience and public interest to traditional fine art.īy the time I arrived at the National Portrait Gallery in 1994, there was a well-established tradition of doing major monographic exhibitions by leading photographers. The museum was allying itself with the enthusiasm for all things British at that time. In 1968, Strong also mounted a spectacularly successful exhibition of the work of Cecil Beaton, which attracted large numbers of visitors and queues round the block. This made the National Portrait Gallery one of the first museums to take photography seriously as an artistic medium. Strong ditched the National Photographic Record in 1970 and recruited Colin Ford as curator of film, photography and television.
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