Jenny Wicks’s fascination with the unexpected appearance of two ginger-nuts in her brother’s family led to this magnetic, sometimes eerie collection of portraits of babies, children and adults possessing the mysterious ginger gene.

There is something other-worldly about red-headed children with staring blue eyes but also something irresistibly beautiful. This collection of portraits represents both, and also stretches to those strange mongrel beards adorning brown-headed men.

Ginger-haired young women have long been chosen subjects in art history, none more passionately than those hand-picked by the Pre-Raphaelites. Their combination of orange hair and porcelain white skin, epitomised today by Lily Cole, appears throughout the show, and Wicks exaggerates it in the plain white backgrounds.

Making a mockery of the term “redhead”, the palette forms a glorious autumnal swatch, while the distribution of pigment is fascinating: sometimes, a single tone appears to have leached from hair into skin and gathered in small puddles as freckles.

Walking among these portraits has the air of a scientific sampling, like a Victorian survey. And in some ways it is; Wicks’s fascination is as much with the journey of the ginger gene as with photography as art — and that element is just as striking as the show’s value as an exquisite portrait collection.
Until 8 March. Information: 020 7749 6853,
www.ideageneration.co.uk.