Haunting portrait photographs, including a swan-necked David Bowie photographed in 1978, the playwright Nell Dunn looking startlingly like a long-lost Bowie twin, and Vita Sackville-West, the writer, gardener and former lover of Virginia Woolf who was still formidable in the year before her death in 1962, have been donated to the National Portrait Gallery by the society photographer Lord Snowdon.

The gift of 130 original prints, including photographs of his former in-laws from the years he was married to Princess Margaret, is one of the largest ever to the gallery