Jacqueline Mitelman

My name is Jacqueline Mitelman. I won the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2011 with my portrait of Suzi Alesandra. She just has a fabulous face and a lot of experience written on it, you know? She came dressed like that but I really liked it, I thought it looked, you know it looked very Renaissance to me, you know? Because she's half Italian I thought that, you know, she looked very Renaissance too, I suppose.

That was taken with natural light in the studio I used to have. I remember after I'd chosen that one and I was going to put it in Portrait Prize and I got it framed, I went to the other side of the studio and looked at it and I thought, it reads, it reads from the other side of the studio. The hardest thing is, is to actually get somebody as they are, in a way, you know, because people are uncomfortable. If you get through that discomfort and they're looking very directly at you, the viewer should feel that they looking at them and that they're making a certain contact with them.

Why do I think the prize is important? Well, it's a way of seeing your work against sort of contemporary, it's more or less, or people who are working and it's lovely to have the recognition. I think whenever you put something in a competition, there's a part of you that till the last moment hopes that it's going to get in or that other people will see in it what you saw. Now, they don't always, but with the Suzi picture, I felt there was something really right about it. I just really loved it and it didn't fade for me.

You know, there's some photographs you take in your life and you sort of fall in love with them for a short period of time and then a couple of years later they don't look quite as interesting, the ones that endured, the ones that always look good to you. So the Suzi picture was one that always looked good to me.