Monthly Archives: September 2020

Currently closed for major redevelopment, the National Portrait Gallery has asked members of the public to send in their photographs of locked out life to be chosen for a curated exhibition, a glimpse of life in these confusing times. The response has been overwhelming – over 31,000 of which 100 were chosen. Choosing 100 – so that the exhibit itself isn’t overwhelming and confusing – must have been an impressive task. If the idea was brilliantly simple and entirely appropriate, its execution had to be both imaginative and appropriate, and it would have been too easy to slip into the easy charm.

The notion was obviously suggested by the Duchess of Cambridge, the active patron of the NPG who herself has studied art history, and the panel included not only NPG director Nicholas Cullinan, but a professional photographer, Maryam Wahid, writer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay. , and Head Nurse Ruth May – a neat mix of backgrounds, professions and ages. The themes were broad: Helpers and Heroes; Your new normal; The acts of kindness and the photographs received were accompanied by explanatory captions from their creators. The refinement of the images chosen alleviates any sentimentality, but they are more overtly emotional than most photographic anthologies.

Be safe daddy (shown below, by Ceri A. Edwards) shows us just a fragment of a man’s face. He is identified by his uniform badge as a member of the ambulance service, embracing his young daughter, Poppy, with his back turned towards the viewer, his long hair swinging his father’s arm who holds her securely. Layers of emotion, in a crisp image: the black and white photograph increasing the intensity between the child’s white T-shirt and his father’s dark uniform.

In Grandmother + grandfather = love a masked man pushes a beautifully dressed lady in her wheelchair down a suburban street, her granddaughter on her lap. We witness a different type of couple as a caregiver, with mask and visor, and wearing gloves, touches the shoulder of an old man sitting on a bed. In Armor mila a young girl, her hair lost from chemotherapy, looks out of a downstairs window into the street, her hand on the glass. From the outside, his radiant father. This is what the broken one looks like shows us a beautiful young woman in a room full of medical supplies; the red marks all over her face are fingerprints from the protections she just removed.

Home Hair (main picture) is comically obvious; the child grimaces, hiding his eyes while the father, razor in hand, does his best, though insufficient, to rise to the domestic occasion as a family barber. Meanwhile, back at the supermarket, a totally exhausted young man in Tesco uniform, nearly asleep as he collapses exhausted, is shown under the title Just another night shift.

One spring evening, a nonagenarian couple, the woman in slippers, is in front of their modest semi-detached, touching their hands: applauding for the NHS. A masked mother in a hospital bed kisses her newborn baby, still bloodied from birth, through a plastic sheeting. A young man watches a funeral unfold in an empty church through his laptop. A mother and child sit relaxed in the sun on a small outdoor balcony decorated with linen. People greet each other through the windows; children are educated at the kitchen table; a child draws a picture of his grandmother to sit next to her; another grandmother appears on a laptop to read a bedtime story; a woman wearing a casual party hat has a lockdown conversation on her computer with her family on her 100th birthday alone in her chair in her sitting position.

Clicking on each image gives us the story for the subject and the photographer. It is the portrait of a nation, and everything is not funny or even hopeful. A self-portrait shows a woman with tears streaming down her face: she had to protect herself, as she suffers from leukemia, and lost everything she was working for in her optimistic handling of her situation where she had started to retrain – a sad irony – as a pharmacy distributor.

In Sorry (photo above right), three masked adult brothers loom against a plastic curtain in hospital just after their father died after two weeks with the virus.

And a mother painted her daughter’s portrait; they both live in a shelter, victims of domestic violence, and her daughter due to confinement has lost school, pets, friends, and yet has regained an extraordinary inner resilience. And the portrait shows her sitting on a window sill, seen through a gauze curtain, playing with her toys, silhouetted against a tree outside in the midst of summer foliage. It is titled by the anonymous mother Loss of lifestyle not of life. As we visitors walk through such revealing snapshots of other people’s lives – isolation, work, relationships, families, celebrations, births and dying – perhaps our own confinement eases a bit and our understanding. extraordinary social, financial and emotional ramifications of these unprecedented months are increasing. Each photograph is revealing: both a window and a mirror.

Perhaps that is the message if there is one. And that cliché is so true: a picture is worth a thousand words, even if, yes, captions help. When events permit, Hold on will be shot in real time and in space across the country.

The only omission from this highly individual and touching kaleidoscope of human life during a pandemic is oddly the absence of pets; we have been told all the time that pets of all kinds are on top, but here they are invisible. Not a puppy or a kitten to see, all hidden.