Mostly Women:
Photographs by Michael Ward

The National Portrait Gallery in London, England presents Mostly Women: Photographs by Michael Ward on display until October 15^th, 2006.

The retrospective celebrates the photographic career and extraordinary life of the portraitist and photojournalist Michael Ward. After exploring career paths that involved everything but photography including classical music and a brief spell in acting, Ward started his photographic career in 1958. He worked principally for the Evening Standard and contributed to the paper's Show Page. Each week he photographed a prominent celebrity of the day including Julie Christie, Barbara Windsor, Geraldine McEwan, Jackie Collins and Tsai Chin. Other assignments for teenage magazines introduced Michael Ward to the pop boom of the early 1960s.

In 1964 Ward was first asked to work for the Sunday Times and for the next thirty years he regularly contributed portrait photographs and news photography of actors, writers, painters and politicians. He retired in 1994 in order to organize his archives and write his autobiography.

In 2001 Ward's photographs were featured as part of the very popular National Portrait Gallery exhibition Sixties Style. The National Portrait Gallery has over fifty of his portraits, spanning three decades, in the Photography Collection and this new display includes some of Ward's best known portrait photographs of many of the major stars of the 1960s. These photographs include Jane Asher, Julie Christie, Sarah Miles, and the pop artist Pauline Boty. Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s include those of the then editor of Tatler, Tina Brown and Ward's fifth and current wife the dancer and actress Elizabeth Seal best remembered for her role as Irma in Irma La Douce (1956).

These black and white portraits are shown alongside some of Ward's best known photo-journalism including a photograph of Shirley Williams campaigning to an invisible electorate for the 1977 Stechford bye-election and two women shoppers oblivious to the Belfast troubles going on around them.

More information can be found by visiting http://www.npg.org.uk