The National Portrait Gallery are playing host to two photographic exhibitions at the moment, both a kind of memorial to important people in our society, albeit of very different kinds.

Queen and Country has been produced by Steve McQueen, who might share his name with the famous American actor in The Great Escape, but has a Turner Prize, a BAFTA and a Golden Camera from Cannes Film Festival to his name. No worries about living in his namesake’s shadow then. Queen and Country was created by McQueen in response to a visit he made to Iraq in 2003, following his appointment by the Imperial War Museum’s Art Commissions Committee as an official UK war artist.

He has collaborated with 160 families whose loved ones have lost their lives in the war in Iraq, creating a cabinet containing a series of facsimile postage sheets, each one dedicated to a deceased soldier. A hugely moving and personal representation of all those that have died fighting in Iraq. The artist and the families are also pressing the Royal Mail to put the stamps into production, a request that has rather ashamedly been turned down. McQueen has used a large oak cabinet with sliding vertical drawers to present 98 sheets of postage stamps. Each sheet depicts a different member of the armed services who has died in the conflict, and each sheet tells us who is depicted, and when they died.

Next door, the Irving Penn Portraits celebrate the famous photographer and his subjects. This exhibition sticks with the celebrity portraiture that made Penn famous, and features mostly his images for Vogue for which he worked for half a century.It is hung chronologically, allowing the viewer to follow the evolutions in his style. Each picture in the exhibition is silver gelatin, unforgiving monochrome highlighting every wrinkle and imperfection in the sitters’ faces.

The alliance between the highly-regarded artistic Penn and Vogue would be odd today, but at a time when celebrity meant a different thing, a collaboration like this was the norm. Penn was a photographer who didn’t just play to his sitters’ egos, often undressing them with his lense, and gave the public a completely different view of the celebrities that filled their newspapers and cinema screens. Hopefully Annie Leibovitz and her colleagues will take note, contemporary photographers might stop pandering to the ego’s of their sitters, and the public will have something new and more interesting to look at again. Thanks Irving, for reminding us what celebrity photographers can do.

Queen and Country, Free

Irving Penn Portraits, £10

The National Portrait Gallery, 2 Saint Martin’s Place, WC2H 0HE, 020 7312 2491

by Agnes Frimston