The best portraits are always revealing and intriguing at the same time. Revealing because the photographer has managed to capture some sort of essence, something fundamental about the person being photographed. Intriguing because the viewer will never quite manage to find everything out, never quite get to the point of knowing what he sees.
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, shows the best of what contemporary portrait photography has to offer. The portrayed subjects vary from people affected by violence, war and poverty, to celebrities –Keira Knightley, Julian Assange, Dolly Parton–, to those who always make for the most interesting subject matter for no particular reason at all: women.
The winner of this year’s prize is Jooney Woodward with her portrait Harriet and Gentleman Jack. The photograph shows a 13-year old girl, Harriet Power, posing with her guinea pig Gentleman Jack. The strength of the image lays not only in Harriet’s shy expression, but also in the striking resemblance in both colour and texture between Jack’s fur and the beautiful ginger hair locks of his owner.
Roughly speaking, there are two ways of portraying that are often used. In the first one, the subject stares directly into the camera with an intense look in her or his eyes. The second consists of the sitter staring into the distance; the eyes absent, the mind anything but.
Sveta by Hadas Mualem, a portrait of a young woman the photographer met on the streets of Haifa, is an example of the first approach. Sveta looks right at the viewer, her gaze so intense one almost has the feeling she will walk out of the frame, something that is partly due to the size of the print, nearly showing Sveta in real life measurements.
Examples of the second approach include Grace, a portrait of a prostitute in Uganda, by Carol Allen Storey and a portrait of footballer Peter Crouch by Spencer Murphy. Most captivating is Melinda, Finland by Tina Hillier, showing a woman waking up in the pinkish light of Finnish dawn. The description of the work explains Melinda is a young artist photographed on the day her work was about to be exhibited. In a poetic way, both clear morning light and Melinda seem to be full of expectations.
Some of the portraits of couples make for the most interesting images. Jonathan May’s The Embrace shows an older gay couple full of tattoos, embracing each other bare-chested in their kitchen. The sharp contrast between the sweetness of their intimacy and the roughness of their bodies makes me curious about their life. The same goes for the identical twins Monette and Mandy, portrayed in the Rue des Partants in Paris by Maja Daniels. Wearing exactly the same impeccable suits and hairdos, these older ladies appear to have walked out of a surreal film, leaving me wondering whether they would stir their café au lait at exactly the same pace, or would quarrel over both wanting one particular croissant at the bakery.
I was most intrigued by Normio and Miss HK by Colin Hampden-White. Hampden-White portrayed amateur photographers with their models. Normio and Miss HK shows a pair consisting of a photographer in her early twenties and a nude model in her late teens. At first the viewer is tempted to assume the two are sisters, as they pose in a similar way. The photographer has one hand in her trouser pocket, the other confidently on her camera; the model, trousers and camera being absent, has one hand on her hip, the other in front of her on her thigh.
Upon taking a closer look, it is clear that the girls are very different from one another. While their body positions are the same, one girl is clearly a photographer, confident and in charge, and the other is a model, aware of how she looks into the camera and, well, naked.
Hampden-White told me he did not direct them into posing in the same way. Yet, for some reason and probably without realising it, both mimicked each other’s position. In revealing their similarities, whilst maintaining their distinct identities, Normio and Miss HK does what the best portrait photography does: reveal and intrigue.
