Super Mario goes on show

The National Portrait Gallery is unused to such glamour: fashion's favourite photographer, Mario Testino, has breezed into this low-key space full of respectful, considered paintings, bringing the allure for which he's famous. His gorgeous subjects (some of them blown up to huge proportions) are plastered all over the usually sombre walls. It can't last: in four months, he'll whisk the 100-odd photos away and move on to fashion's holy grail - the Next Big Thing.

Testino has been blending portraiture and fashion for more than 25 years, but his career-defining moment was the shoot with Princess Diana for Vanity Fair three months before her death. Testino made Diana look not just human but happy. She was photographed in bright light and natural make- up, without jewellery, wearing dresses she had worn as royalty and was now, significantly, auctioning for charity.

They're wonderful pictures, even more compelling in large format. Testino may never surpass them, partly because the Lima-born photographer makes no secret of the importance freedom holds for him. For the Catholic Peruvian kid who fell in love with London because you could wear what you liked (and when he arrived, full into the blast of punk, what people liked was outlandish to a fault) , the uncaged princess must have been a perfect subject.

These days, there's barely anyone famous whom Testino hasn't photographed. Madonna, ahead of the zeitgeist as ever, requested him for her Versace campaign in 1995 and he has returned many times since, including, memorably, her first pictures with baby Lourdes.

He apparently discovered Brazilian beauty Gisele, but Kate Moss, if anyone, is his muse: his constant, crucial experimentation with poses and styles is most obvious with her, because of their long relationship and the many grouped and solo photographs he has taken of her in a bewildering range of guises.

These portraits of models, royals, film stars and fashionistas aren't great art, but they are great fun: frozen fractions of what look like immensely enjoyable seconds, they exist to inspire envy and pleasure in equal doses for the length of a fashion moment. And then they'll be gone.

Until June 4, National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place WC2, daily 10am to 6pm (Thu and Fri to 9pm), £6, £4 concs.

Tel: 020 7306 0055
www.npg.org.uk
Tube: Leicester Square

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