In my mum and dad’s bedroom wall in their house in Wigan is a picture I love, and not just for the rather narcissistic reason that the subject is me. No, I would love the picture whoever the subject, just because of the incidental detail, the visual furniture of the shot that makes it such an evocative record of a working-class home in the North of England in the mid-1960s.

There are the clothes I’m wearing: white shorts, a somewhat prim white cardigan and a pair of smart buckle-up Clarks sandals. In fact, like a tiny Roger Federer, come to think of it. Then there’s my haircut, an extraordinary and quite unnecessary sort of comb-over achieved with what seems to be liberal, if not profligate, use of one of the last tubs of Brylcreem surely ever used on a child in England. And I love the wallpaper, with its touchingly mock-exotic tropical motifs of palm trees and lagoons. Early Abigail’s Party might be the technical term, or You’ve Never Had It So Good-ish.

But of course the reason my mum and dad love this battered and oft-reframed photograph is not because of these sociological incidentals, these signifiers of history. They just like it, bless ’em, because it’s me. Me looking cute at 3 or 4 or thereabouts, pouting sweetly into the lens of a professional they must have found in the back pages of the Lancashire Evening Post and Chronicle. Professional Photographer, Weddings, Portraiture, Passports, In Your Home or At The Studio. Preserve Your Treasured Memories. A Unique Gift or Keepsake.

Many of the portraits that have been entered and won this estimable prize would not fall into any of those categories. They represent all the possibilities of portrait photography and the results can be witty, disturbing, melancholic, joyous and all shades of emotion in between. Here are people waking up, people bored, people engaged, people at work and people at play, people known and people unknown, all caught in the confusing, maddening, delirious daily business of being human.

Some of these pictures are posed, some are snapped impromptu. And some are somewhere between, naturalism pushed a little in a certain direction. I’m interested in this because since becoming a part of the media myself I’ve had to get used to the business of having my photograph taken. It’s a curious business, both uniquely pleasurable (since, after all, who is so modest and selfless to not enjoy being lavished with attention?) and uniquely uncomfortable. Because that initially flattering lever of attention turns soon, for me, anyway, to a shrinking away from such loving but pitiless scrutiny. And the knowledge that every double chin, every unruly tuft of hair, every ill-advised fashion decision will be there, if not for ever then for a year or two, stored in a file or folder on the movable steel shelves in a newspaper office or, more likely these days, as pixels on a hard drive in a corner of a directory marked “Minor Northern media types”.

What must it be like for Kate Moss and Nelson Mandela, Bono, Madonna and Barack Obama? Does a single day go by when these people are not photographed? How many thousands of images have been stored of each of them? Lives lived through lenses, darkly and otherwise. And then think of Myra Hindley. Or the blues singer Robert Johnson. Or Carlos the Jackal. Known for ever, frozen into the public imagination in one second by one click of one camera.

By the way, I remember — or at least I think I remember — that first picture. It is one of my earliest memories along with hearing the Beatles sing Can’t Buy Me Love at my cousin Eileen’s house, and playing with Stephen Horrocks in the sandpit on my first day at St Joseph’s juniors. I seem to recall a buzz of excitement, an extra wipe of the face with the dampened hanky and a strange man coming to the house with various mysterious paraphernalia. And then being hoisted on to a dining room table, limbs arranged deftly, told to smile and then a pop, a fizz, a flash of light.

A moment caught for ever, held in precarious enduring life still. On the wall of a little house in the North of England.

© Stuart Maconie, extracted from Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 (National Portrait Gallery, £12.99). The exhibition (020-7306 0055; npg.org.uk) runs until February 14

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