Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009
National Portrait Gallery, London
The problems of painters who produce portraits in a genre that seems to be dominated by photography may be mild in comparison to those facing photographers who also set out to produce “portraits” that must catch and hold our attention, despite the fact that we know little about the subject shown. Such is the task faced by the photographers competing for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize last year, who responded impressively. Some 2,451 international photographers submitted a total of 6,413 prints, from which 60 were selected.
Now that the craft of photography has moved from the old-fashioned, film-based medium to the new digital age, skill lies more and more in work on the computer. Here, colour can be adjusted or drastically changed, areas can be highlighted and cropping can be easily accomplished, completely confounding the notion that these are in any sense “snapshots”. The fiction that the “camera cannot lie”, although always a popular maxim, is even less accurate today, as photographers abstract the image – selecting and rejecting, posing and grouping, distancing and moving in more tightly. The outcome may offer a more objective, “distanced” view or a close-up that makes us feel we are actually “there”.
The entries in the Taylor Wessing exhibition are primarily from professional photographers – a point well illustrated by the fact that the winner, Paul Floyd Blake, was awarded first prize in 2005, which seems somehow a repeat performance in highlighting the artist’s work. There is little wrong with his image depicting swimmer Rosie Bancroft sitting turning to look at the camera, following an event in Oxford. What this initially looks to be is a moody shot, as Bancroft reflects on the swimmer. A closer examination reveals that the teenager has no right foot, which was removed when she was 10 months old. When friends introduced her to competitive swimming, she achieved great success and now plans to compete in the British team for the 2012 London Paralympics.
The sense of ennui suffusing Blake’s image of the lonely locker room figure is also to be seen in Michal Chelbin’s image of a 14-year-old teenager, Stas. He slumps on bed number two in a dormitory packed with identical beds, barely inches apart, but devoid of people. The setting is a juvenile prison in Russia and Stas has been sentenced for murder.
Chelbin, who began her profession while serving as a field photographer during two years of mandatory military service in the Israeli army, spent several days in the medium security prison, gradually building up trust with Stas before taking the image. Suffused with an eerie blue light, the melancholic youth lies dejected and rejected – an isolated figure awaiting his fate, part of a system that appears to deny individuality in favour of conformity. There is a tragic story here, which we must fathom out for ourselves.
Chelbin’s forlorn figure needs no tricks to hold our attention, despite the carefully posed shot, but other images picture men with curiously long beards, babies in baths, scary figures with exotic tattoos and piercings, children with amazingly large eyes, appealing pets, curiously wrinkled faces, intriguing ethnic garb, family snaps, defiant smokers and female – but not male – nudity. Useful captions by each image helps to set context, but the strength of the exhibition is the individuals portrayed and some sense of their deeper characters beyond what we see on the surface.
My eyes returned again and again to the portrait of Stas – did I feel sympathy for this abandoned figure who may have committed the most horrendous crimes? Whatever, here he appears as much victim as victimiser.
Emmanuel Cooper
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 continues until February 14
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