The portrait is deceptively simple. Charli xcx leans back against a pale wall in a white crop top and dark jeans, her voluminous dark hair caught mid-movement, her gaze directed downward and slightly away from the camera. There's no performance, no direct address, no obvious glamour. Just an intimacy and a slight vulnerability; the feeling of catching someone in a private moment rather than a staged one. For a photograph of one of the world's most recognisable pop stars, it's an unconventional choice.
Which is why I applaud the fact it's now hanging in Room 33 of London's National Portrait Gallery. Taken in 2024 by British photographer and director Harley Weir, the portrait has entered the NPG's permanent collection through Collecting the Now, the gallery's contemporary acquisitions fund supported by a £1 million gift from the Bukhman Foundation. It's on display in the History Makers space, which celebrates figures who have shaped contemporary culture and public life.
Charli certainly fits into that category. Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison in Cambridge in 1992, she's spent more than a decade as one of pop's most restlessly inventive figures. In 2024, her album Brat became a global phenomenon, spawning its own aesthetic, its own colour (a specific shade of acid green) and its own philosophy, "Brat Summer"; a shorthand for unfiltered self-expression that spread through culture and politics like wildfire.
Her next release, a soundtrack album accompanying the 2026 movie of Wuthering Heights, topped the UK chart in February. Her latest album, Music, Fashion, Film, was released on 24 July to five-star reviews. The gallery's acquisition places her in the permanent record at exactly the moment her cultural reach is at its widest.
Why it works
The technical approach here is worth examining closely. The image has the warm, slightly faded palette and shallow depth of field associated with medium-format film, giving it a tactile quality at odds with the hyper-sharpness of most contemporary portraiture. It feels closer in spirit to a 1970s music press photograph than a modern album campaign image, which is presumably exactly what Weir intended.
That quality is characteristic of Weir's practice. London-born and now in her late thirties, she built her reputation shooting for fashion houses including Balenciaga, Celine and Gucci, but her work consistently pushes against the glossiness those clients might imply.
Her visual language draws on documentary and fine art photography as much as fashion; she shows regularly with London galleries Hannah Barry and Michael Hoppen alongside her commercial work. The NPG's senior curator of photographs Brandei Estes describes it as combining "intimacy with a powerful sense of presence," which the Charli xcx portrait demonstrates neatly.
Why it matters
The acquisition speaks to something broader about how cultural institutions are thinking about photography. Collecting the Now, launched in March 2025, has already brought in works by Barbara Walker, Linder and Sonia Boyce, building a collection of contemporary portraiture that takes photography seriously as a fine art medium rather than a secondary category.
For me, the best thing about this portrait is that Weir didn't reach for the obvious. Given a subject at the peak of her fame, she made something quiet, personal and slightly resistant; an image that works as fine art portraiture precisely because it avoids the cliches of the promotional photograph.
