This exhibition is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 6th April 2014. My final assignment for People and Place will comprise a series of portraits, so I was doubly interested.
One recurring theme here is twins. There's always been something sexy about twins, since long before the Collinsons. There are three photographs of twins here; my favourite was:
The Twins, by Adrian Peacock.
Two elderly women, identical twins, are posed lying on a bed, dressed in bathrobes. There's no sexual feeling here; they're clearly comfortable with each other - if not with the situation the photographer has put them in. A display of innocent affection.
Other images that caught my eye:
Jari and Terhi, by Jari Salo
And expectant couple, drug users; she very pregnant and looking at him while he looks to camera. His eyes are bloodshot; has he been crying? They face a tough future together, coping with parenthood and battling addiction.
Beauty Recovery Room 01, by J Yeo
A young woman, clad in tights and bra, sits on a bed in a room, looking at the image of herself in a mirror off. She has a bandage over her head and under her chin, having recently had plastic surgery. There's a mixture of hope and fear on her face.
Mary Beard, by Adrian Peacock
This woman with controversial opinions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)) sits on an upright chair with a French window behind. There are books piled on the table beside her, indicative of her calling. A sunlit book provides reflective light up onto her face. The media cruelly said of her, "should be kept away from a camera". The photographer accepted the implied challenge and has produced a warm, sympathetic, attractive image, avoiding problems like double chin, etc.
Zadie Smith, by Linda Bowler
This writer stares calmy out of a window off left, her hands clasped comfortably together. A vertical pale line (curtain?) divides the frame into left (model) and right (a blank, dark space). The composition is interesting, and works. A different, more conventional, framing would not be as powerful. Something for me to consider.
Sofia, by Nestor Diaz
The photographer's wife sits right, her crossed legs pointing left. She has had a mastectomy; the scar has healed. This picture is partly about colour: the luminous green of the wall behind the orange of her patterned skirt, the light tan of her skin, paler on the surviving breast, darker on the depressed site where the other was. Her direct gaze is challenging: "This is what I look like. Get over it."
Vanessa Redgrave, by Christopher Lane
I'm afraid that this seems to be a picture of the still-beautiful woman's sack-like jumper, which dominates the frame. The shadow of her underwear showing through it helps draw attention away from her face. If most of it were cropped away, this would become a picture of the woman, not her clothing, and her beauty and strength would be prominent.
I detect two themes in my response to these images.
The idea of a story, of something about to happen, interests me. It extends the interest of the photograph into the future. Without it, a photograph has no time but the instant at which it was taken. It allows the viewer to contribute to the picture by speculating what is to happen next.
The other one is more commercial. People usually want to appear their best, and in a formal portrait the photographer is generally expected to try to achieve this. There's a strong contrast between the photographs of Mary Beard and Vanessa Redgrave. In one, the photographer has shown the best of his model. In the other, he's allowed her beauty to slip away.
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