It is hardly surprisingly that the overall winner of this year's £12,000 Photographic Portrait Prize is Paul Floyd Blake's image of Rosie Bancroft.

On first glance, this softly focused, quiet scene of a girl in a swimsuit in a changing room is quite ordinarily beautiful but elevated by her self-assured stare, carrying the optimism and hope of all Olympic contenders.

On second viewing, you take in her artificial foot and leg.

Rosie is a 13-year-old hopeful for the Paralympics in 2012 but this is not mentioned in the caption and does not in the least affect the quality or perfect composition.

Each year, poignancy sits beside glamour, apathy with wit, beauty with weirdness at this exhibition, where five prize-winners and 55 runners-up, selected from more than 6,000 submissions, offer a vision of trends in portrait photography.

Visitors gaze silently, forming their own narratives.

Annual themes recur - redheads, dogs, freckles (this year, chickenpoxed skin), babies, and, rarely, the classic, monochrome photo-documentary usually reserved for the World Press Awards.

Here, Carol Storey's intimate portrait of a Rwandan rape victim reflects her exceptional skill in documenting such agony.

In contrast, pain is implied in third prize winner Michal Chelbin's Stas: a child murderer, lying blankly on a bed in a prison dormitory.

The multi-award winning Vanessa Winship received second prize for Girl in a Golden Dress, Georgia, which follows her previous success with her Turkish Sisters project.

Again, she exposes a prepubescent girl to the camera in a classic, static posture but subtle changes transform the work: the girl is now positioned off-centre, against a textured, flat wall, the silky dress contrasting with previous harshness.

At the opposite end of glamour is Michael Birt's image of a lace-clad Polly Stenham, London's latest theatre darling.

The Elle magazine award went to Ali Lomas for her image of a distressed young woman in her underwear in a bathroom, sensitively handling a major issue, it possesses a serene beauty and a painterly quality.

This year also sees the first "landscape" images: distant, expansive scenes where the human presence doesn't dominate, surely a trend-setter in a very good year for portrait photography.

Until 14 February (020 7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk).