National Portrait Gallery Creates CHANEL Curator of Photography Role

London's National Portrait Gallery has created a new post, the CHANEL Curator of Photography, with the first appointee to be named later this autumn. The role is the first medium-specific position CHANEL has supported at the NPG, and it extends a partnership between the gallery and the CHANEL Culture Fund that dates back to 2020.

For practitioners, the significance is institutional: photography at the NPG now has a dedicated curatorial advocate with funded research capacity behind it. "The National Portrait Gallery's photographs collection spans more than 250,000 images from the 1840s to today," says Dr Flavia Frigeri, the gallery's chief curator. "The new Chanel post will raise the collection's profile by supporting research and the development of a future strategy."

What did the earlier CHANEL posts deliver?

Between 2020 and 2025, the CHANEL Culture Fund supported the CHANEL Curator for the Collection at the NPG, a post held by Dr Flavia Frigeri, who is now the gallery's Chief Curator. Frigeri led the Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture project, which addressed the gender imbalance in the NPG's collection through acquisitions, research and site-specific commissions.

The initiative also included the Madame Yevonde project, which funded the conservation, research, cataloguing and digitisation of Yevonde's 2,000 tri-colour separation negatives, acquired by the NPG in 2021. CHANEL Culture Fund directly supported the exhibition Yevonde: Life and Colour, which ran from 22 June to 15 October 2023 and featured more than 150 works by the pioneering image-maker.

How far does the partnership now travel?

CHANEL Culture Fund recently invited the NPG to curate an exhibition at CHANEL Nexus Hall in Ginza, Tokyo, on show until 29 November. Icons and Image Makers: Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery gathers 59 photographs of British icons from the NPG's collection, including Jack Davison's 2016 portrait of Ruth Negga, Tami Aftab's 2021 photograph of Olivia Dean, and work by Irving Penn, Juergen Teller and Harry Borden, whose Spice Girls portrait features in the show. It is the CHANEL Culture Fund's first exhibition with one of its partner institutions to be staged in Japan.

The fund's partner network reaches beyond London: Centre Pompidou in Paris, Power Station of Art in Shanghai, Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. It was also the main sponsor of the French Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Its photography-specific commitments run deeper still:

• Support for the Kyotographie International Photography Festival in Japan.
• Backing for British artist Linder's first exhibitions in Japan, at both Kyotographie and CHANEL Nexus Hall.
• A commission for US photographer Roe Ethridge in early 2026 to create collages exploring Gabrielle Chanel's possessions, shown at CHANEL Nexus Hall and Kyotographie.
• An earlier solo show at both venues by Indian image-maker Pushpamala N.

What is the Curatorial Award doing for Chinese photography?

The fund also supports the Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival, and in 2021 co-founded the Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image with festival organiser Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. The award nurtures a new generation of Chinese curators and researchers through open calls, master classes, project funding and mentorship. Artist/curator duos submit proposals, which the award develops and supports; selected proposals appear in a group show at the festival, and one winning proposal receives further realisation and a tour.

This year's group show, Afterglow, runs at Jimei x Arles from 17 November to 3 January. Curated by Rachel Wuang, it brings together six artists examining stereotypes of Northeast China: Gu Tao, Hu Weiyi, Li Yong, Liu Yujia, Tong Yutian and Yi Changhong. The 2026 residency for the award's next edition takes place alongside the festival's opening week. Themed 'The Generative Eye', it names rising curator He Yining as mentor, alongside senior curators Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding.

Where does Cindy Sherman fit in?

The CHANEL Culture Fund publishes an annual magazine, Arts & Culture, which launched its second 300-page issue in October. It features work by Linder and NPG director Victoria Siddall, plus new work by Cindy Sherman from her Fabric Matrons series, made with fabric and jewellery the artist was invited to draw from Chanel's archive.

Sherman's collaboration with Chanel reaches back to her Ominous Landscapes series of 2010-2012, in which she built characters wearing garments and accessories from the same archive. Works from Fabric Matrons are on show at Hauser & Wirth, London until 23 December.

Arts & Culture is distributed free at selected art institutions and bookshops, including Paris's Librairie 7L, which Chanel owns. It carries no advertising apart from free publicity for the partner bookshops. The magazine is produced under the direction of Yana Peel, President of Arts, Culture & Heritage at Chanel.

"At the heart of the work of the CHANEL Culture Fund is cultivating care for ideas, for artists, and for the irreplaceable act of making something new," Peel says. "Our ARTS & CULTURE magazine is where that practice leaves its trace. There could be no one better to grace the cover of Vol.2 than Cindy Sherman, who for five decades has examined the construction of identity and the power over personae that women hold. In her photographs, she renders the modern woman – and her freedom of becoming – with empowerment and care."

The first CHANEL Curator of Photography takes up a collection of 250,000 images and a mandate to set its future strategy; the autumn appointment will signal how forcefully the NPG intends to place photography at the centre of its programme.