In a new display of iconic photographic portraits and album covers tracing the band's inventive use of their public image, the National Portrait Gallery celebrates the long career of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe as Pet Shop Boys, the most successful duo in British pop history.

'Being single, and having some money, and having the time - having no men, you see' was how the writer Ivy Compton-Burnett rather bluntly explained why so many women were writing fiction after the First World War. The photographic portraits in this display were made in the period 1920 to1960 when the majority of fiction published was written by women. This phenomenon can also be explained by increased access to formal education and society's growing acceptance of the working woman.

"What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing: you wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought." David Hockney

9 Shades of Whiteley is a mini-retrospective exhibition tracing the artist's life and career from his earliest work in 1955, with Self Portrait at Sixteen, to just a few months before his death, with Port Douglas, Far North Queensland 1992.