Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait exhibition
National Gallery until February 12
A woman lies on a dirty mattress thrown on the ground among tall roadside grasses in Italy, where she works as a prostitute to send money to her family in Nigeria. Disturbingly, our viewpoint is that of her next client. We see only the lower half of her body, and as a person she remains anonymous. It’s a memorable and depressing image, but I’m not at all sure that it’s a portrait.
Another photograph shows another woman posed on a bed, but the circumstances are very different. This is Dolly Parton, famous and very much in control of her own life, staying in a luxurious London hotel. She looks weary as she works her way through a gruelling schedule of media interviews; we are told that the photographer was allowed only ten minutes to take the picture.
These two lives – worlds apart – are pretty representative of what you expect to find at the annual Taylor Wessing Portrait exhibition, which features images by amateur and professional photographers from a variety of countries. In terms of content, the show always adds up to more than the sum of its parts, presenting a highly diverse cross-section of human experience, and in that sense this one does not disappoint.
Dolly Parton is not the only famous face here. The show opens with a surely-too-large image of footballer Peter Crouch, matched a bit further on by an equally huge head and shoulders shot of actress Keira Knightly. Personally, I think size matters, and that many of the 60 pictures in the exhibition are simply too large, reflecting perhaps a misguided desire to make photographs as “important” as paintings. One of the most memorable images, and determinedly painterly, is a Madonna and child in a kind of contemporary-renaissance style. It’s a remarkable piece of work that took six months of post-production, but I’m not sure if it’s still a photograph any more, let alone a portrait.
There are more beds and bedrooms in the show – bedrooms being a particularly intimate space that can give added clues to the personality of the sitter. It’s a bit of a cliché in the picture of a teenage girl surrounded by all the paraphernalia you would expect, but adds poignancy to a portrait of a couple of middle aged empty nesters, posed in a bedroom no longer occupied by their now departed offspring.
Other themes: old age (a centenarian and an over-sentimental shot of a photographer’s aunt with a photo of her deceased husband in the background), deformity (at least three of those, including a much published image of a young Afghan woman whose husband saw fit to remove her nose), teenage girls (including the winning photo) and, inevitably, twins (though only one photo of those).
I liked a picture of two soldiers persuaded to pose somewhat self-consciously in a palace building almost totally wrecked by war – a sharp, superbly detailed shot, but again, not so much a portrait as a piece of war zone reportage, as much about the surroundings as the soldiers themselves.
I also liked a picture of a boy up to his thighs in floodwater, a clever use of reflection that has him poised in the centre of a kind of double image, but again more reportage than portrait. The same applies to a picture of a line of teenagers gathered at the spot where a friend was murdered, which is more like street photography. Yann Gross’s Tatiana and Belene, is an odd and gently humorous picture of a llama in an unexpected landscape posed alongside a local model, but is it really a portrait?
There’s no doubt that the first-prize winner, Harriet and Gentleman Jack by Jooney Woodward, is a portrait and a good one – although its subject, an auburn-haired teenager with a guinea pig, has more than a faint echo of last year’s winning, and more impressive, picture of an auburn-haired teenager with a dead buck slung across her horse. Apparently snapped in the guinea pig judging area of the Royal Welsh Show, it demonstrates that it’s possible to take a good picture almost anywhere!
The TW is always worth seeing, and if overall I wasn’t quite as impressed as last year, it made me think about what does and doesn’t constitute a portrait. I’d say an attempt to put across something of the individuality of the subject is key. And on that basis some of the best pictures in this year’s exhibition are not portraits at all.
Down in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery, on the way to the overpriced café, there’s a small free exhibition of work by Sandra Lousada. These are black-and-white portraits mostly of Sixties icons like Rita Tushingham, Tom Courtney, Cilla Black and Jean Shrimpton, including natural, unposed shots as well as more formal portraits like the one below of James Fox and Sarah Miles. Well worth seeing, it’s on until May 20.
