Opening on 20 February 2025, The Face Magazine: Culture Shift will bring together more than 200 prints by over 80 photographers – including Sheila Rock, Stéphane Sednaoui, David LaChapelle, Corinne Day, Elaine Constantine, Juergen Teller and Sølve Sundsbø. I grew up with The Face, I devoured every issue and looking at these images brings back so many memories so I will be at the National Portrait Gallery for this one.
With many images exhibited for the first time away from the magazine’s pages, the NPG exhibition will explore the impact of The Face on Eighties, Nineties and Noughties culture in Britain and beyond, as well as its influence today.
The Face was started by Nick Logan, formerly editor of New Musical Express (NME) in the 1970s and creator of teen music magazine, Smash Hits. Logan spotted a gap in the market for a monthly title aimed at a youth audience interested in a broad range of subjects that weren’t being featured in glossy fashion publications, teen magazines or the music weeklies. In doing so, he invented a new genre of publishing: the style magazine.
Ray Petri, one of the most influential stylists of the 1980s, redefined men’s fashion within the pages of The Face. He assembled around him a group of west London creatives known as the ‘Buffalo’ group, and worked frequently with photographer Jamie Morgan. Petri and Morgan’s images were radical because of the fashion they featured – which drew inspiration from an eclectic range of references – but also because they created space for black models within the fashion industry. Their first cover together, featuring British-Burmese model Nick Kamen (Winter Sports, Jamie Morgan, January 1984), was a key moment in The Face’s history, with fashion, photography and the discovery of a new face all coalescing to create an image that defined a new zeitgeist. Within two years of appearing on the cover of The Face, Nick Kamen was starring in one of Levi’s best-known advertising campaigns.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is curated by Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, together with Curatorial Consultants Lee Swillingham, former Art Director of The Face from 1992 to 1999, and Norbert Schoerner, a photographer whose work featured in the magazine throughout the Nineties and Noughties.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
20 February – 18 May 2025
National Portrait Gallery, London
Tickets: £23, with concession from £1
Members go free