London's National Portrait Gallery and the CHANEL Culture Fund have created a new curatorial post dedicated to photography. The CHANEL Curator of Photography will be appointed this autumn, extending a partnership between the gallery and the fashion house's cultural fund that began in 2021 and is now in its sixth year.

The new curator will be responsible for building the gallery's photography collection, planning major exhibitions and shaping how photographs from the collection are displayed. The appointment gives photography a dedicated advocate inside an institution whose holdings span painting, sculpture and photography, and whose portrait collection runs from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The partnership has already shaped the gallery's recent history. A three-year project, Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, concluded in 2023 and set out to bring forward women who had contributed to British history and culture but had been under-represented in the collection. Since the project, the number of works by women artists in the gallery's displays of post-1900 work has nearly doubled, and the share of portraits depicting women has risen from about a third in 2020 to about half today.

The gallery reopened in 2023 after a major refurbishment, with an exhibition on the twentieth-century photographer Yevonde, and in 2025 it staged Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture, in which eight contemporary artists made new work in dialogue with the collection. The gallery's director, Victoria Siddall, said the new post would help expand the photography collection, develop ambitious exhibitions and reach new audiences. The gallery's photographs are also on show in Tokyo, at CHANEL Nexus Hall in Ginza.