An internationally renowned, Winchester born, photographer is the subject of an exhibition to celebrate his 80th birthday.

A Life Behind the Lens: Paul Joyce, is hosted at The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre, until November 10.

Joyce has a global reputation as a documentary filmmaker, writer, photographer and painter.

The exhibition features more than 50 of his portraits, along with a selection of paintings and objects that reflect his career.

As well as many famous and well known faces, the exhibition includes a number of photographic landscape works, paintings, collaborations and portfolios from the past five decades.

He has enjoyed a particularly close relationship with artist David Hockney, who has drawn and photographed Joyce on many occasions.

Joyce’s sitters mark historical moments in a variety of genres, not least his capturing of three legends of photography: Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt and Brassai, sitting together on a bench in the garden of the V&A in 1976.

His portraits of celebrated movie makers, including Sir Carol Reed, Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino, show his fine eye for revealing character and expression through close up shots of their faces.

The exhibition is curated by Colin Ford CBE, former director of the National Museum of Wales. It was Ford who curated Joyce’s first London exhibition, Elders, at the National Portrait Gallery in 1978.

He said: “The introduction I wrote in the catalogue of Paul’s 2010 exhibition Unseen Portraits 1967-2009 begins, 'It is astonishing to be reminded that Paul Joyce first showed me some of his early photographic portraits at the National Portrait Gallery more than thirty years ago.'

“Now 45 years later, it seems even more amazing, but very pleasurable, to be able to round off a story which began when I was the first curator of photography in any British national museum or gallery, and to recognise how well his pictures have stood up to the test of time.”