Creative Connections: Camden Radical Characters

Benedict Cumberbatch, Amy Winehouse, Alan Bennett and Dame Tessa Jowell are among the famous faces that will go on show in a new display celebrating the London Borough of Camden and the inspirational figures that have lived, worked or studied there.

Creative Connections: Camden Radical Characters (9 July – 11 October 2015) will showcase thirty photographs of successful people with connections to Camden, who have been selected from the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection by a group of Year 10 GCSE students from Haverstock School in the borough.

Working with the Gallery and photographer Kate Peters, the students researched the personalities and achievements of the figures, identifying their connections with Camden and creating their own series of compelling photographs in response.

Included in the display will be portraits of Dame Agatha Christie, who lived in the Modernist Isokon Building in Hampstead at the same time as several Soviet spies; the Second World War special agent Noor Khan, who lived in Bloomsbury as a child; Sigmund Freud, whose former home in Hampstead is now the Freud Museum; former Camden Councillor and local resident Dame Tessa Jowell; and Dame Barbara Hepworth, whose studio was at the centre of the art world in the late 1930s.

Symbolised by a variety of objects linked to their wide-ranging achievements, the famous people of Camden have been represented in a new series of imaginative photographs created by Kate Peters working with the GCSE students. The striking, large format photographs will be on display in Creative Connections: Camden Radical Characters alongside the inspirational sitters that they depict.

Kate Peters is an award-winning British photographer, working on personal projects and commissions throughout the world. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, including a solo show at HPGRP gallery in New York. In 2012 the Guardian Weekend Magazine commissioned Kate to photograph 32 Olympic hopefuls including Sir Chris Hoy, Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah. A number of Peters’ portraits are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and in 2013 she received the Vic Odden award from the Royal Photographic Society.