John McDonnell MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer speaking at yesterday’s ‘Grants Not Debts’ protest
I take a lot of pictures of people, some of which I share here and rather more on My London Diary. I’ve also photographed many others, including members of my own family and friends I know well. Quite a few of those are framed and hanging on people’s walls, while those I’ve taken of public figures have featured in various magazines and newspapers. Some are better than others but most are pretty routine, like yesterday’s picture of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, a man I know and have photographed on many occasions over the years. It’s not a great image, but you can find worse of him every day in the newspapers.
But I’ve never thought of myself as a portrait photographer. And always rather questioned the whole idea of a photographic portrait. I think there are valid examples – for instance Alfred Stieglitz‘s truly intimate work on Georgia O’Keefe springs to mind, but there I’m thinking not of a single image, but of a whole set of images,beautifully presented in the 1978 Metropolitan Museum of Art publication ‘Georgia O’Keefe – A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz’ which on the front dust-jacket flap states ‘His idea of a portrait was not just one photograph but a series of photographs that would be a portrait of the many aspects of a person.’ (The book is still available from book dealers at a ridiculously cheap price for such a well-produced and important work.)
There are many other pictures of people that I like, many of them good or even great photographs but few which really reach into the depths of a person in they way the best painted portraits do. Though its also very clear if you take a walk around inside – for example – the London National Portrait Gallery that there are many bad painted portraits as well as many poor photographic portraits both in the permanent collection and in their annual prize shows for photography and painting.
But even among photographers whose work I admire greatly, their ‘portraits’ are often the weakest work. Even with a master like Cartier-Bresson there are images which without the name of the famous sitter would probably never have been printed. (Some of his better portraits along with some images that certainly are not portraits and one or two that perhaps fail to display his master touch and were clichés even before he made them are linked in the Portraits selection on his Magnum page.) And newspapers and magazines are full of poor or indifferent if sometimes technically competent images of people.
What got me thinking about this was a video created by The Lab in conjunction with Canon Australia in which they set up six portrait photographers to photograph the same man, giving each a very different story about him. Looking at what you can see of their results on the video published in the story by Shutterbug, each produced a very proficient image based on the story they were given, particularly as they were given only ten minutes (though often photographers have to do with considerably less, while painters often have months rather than minutes.) But I don’t think any of them was really a portrait of the person, rather an illustration for the story they were told.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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