The 15th Photographic Portrait Prize coincides with the National Portrait Gallery’s Annie Leibovitz show. In the same gallery as some of the most expensive shoots in history are images by little-known photographers but both exhibitions span celebrity and moments with family and friends.

The image on the catalogue cover is Hendrik Kersten’s Bag, a beautiful portrait of a young woman’s head and shoulders floating against a black background, wearing a plastic bag headdress in the style of a Dutch Old Master’s model. Its position implies it won first prize but it was actually second to Lottie Davies’s Quints, which also makes art historical connections — to the late 19th-century Pictorialists. Davies’s naked mother of quintuplets lies on a bed cradling naked, pink babies. Was it the nakedness or the digital manipulation that led to Bag being so prominent?

No confusion over Catherine Balet’s third place-winning Ines Connected with Amina — two schoolgirls communicating via laptop and email in their room, a quiet study of the times, lit by their screens. In fourth place, Tom Stoddart captures a lugubrious monochrome moment in Murdoch Reflects — an incongruously vulnerable representation of one so powerful. Taking the new Godfrey Argent Prize, Vanessa Winship’s Sweet Nothings is a mesmerising portrait of two Turkish schoolgirls posing in matching school dresses.

This year’s crop of 60 is exceptionally rich in range, vitality, originality and internationalism. Particularly welcome is a focus on context, bringing more narrative but never allowing the mundane to dominate. Breaking any unwritten rules of youthfulness, this collection welcomes themes of ageing, illness and death in the portrait of spruced-up Auschwitz survivor Joel Redman. Of the celebrities, Platon Antoniou’s cold depiction of Putin for Time magazine is calculatedly revealing. Most fabulous is Chris Floyd’s close-up of the photo-phobic artist Steve McQueen, literally grinning and bearing it.

Closing the show, Silvia Amodio’s poster-sized contact-prints of 16 South African township inhabitants, Positive Faces, offers positive expressions in not-so positive lives — an uplifting end to an exhilarating collection.
Until 15 February 2009
(www.npg.org.uk, 020 7312 2463).