IT is often said that the camera doesn’t lie but it can certainly play a visual trick or two, as an exhibition opening this weekend in Newcastle amply demonstrates.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize brings together work by young and established photographers, professionals and amateurs. It is a springboard for some, a showcase for others.

For the viewers, who can see the exhibition from Saturday at the Laing Art Gallery, it is proof that the world we may think we know so well is a place of constant surprises.

The exhibition, organised by the National Portrait Gallery, is also a competition, and a lucrative one too. The judges, including National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairn and photographer and writer David A Bailey, had to pick the winner of the £12,000 first prize.

It went to Surrey-born Lottie Davies, 37, for her photograph Quints, one image in an ongoing project called Memories & Nightmares.

You see it across the top of this page, a photograph showing a woman in the style of an odalisque, a harem inhabitant beloved of artists seeking a saucy subject in centuries past.

Davies’s large format shot was inspired by her friend Caroline’s nightmare in which she was expecting quintuplets. The photographer hired a model, Alicia, to pose as Caroline and used Alicia’s baby niece, Marla, as all five of the nightmare offspring.