Portraits n Porridge

I was standing in the National Portrait Gallery today......wondering.
 
The Taylor Wessing Portrait exhibition was on. I don’t know why but I had watched the video of the Philando Castile murder in the USA earlier in the day, moved to tears. The exhibition had captured the diversity of the world… good and bad, happy and sad.
 
It’s a troubled time. What bothered me was the people who were at the exhibition could have been people in any major art gallery anywhere in the world. Very few of the masses. Rather, gentlemen with tortoise shell spectacles and rouged ladies in pashminas, art students who haven’t done too many drugs and cultured Hispanic people.
 
Photography often speaks far more loudly than any news program…. especially portraiture.  Well captured eyes link the viewer into a still image, as if brains are coupled, linking two people that have never met, feeling their happiness or pain. But there’s also an invisible wall preventing the masses from making such connections. Art so democratic yet utterly exclusive.  
 
Take this chap….. look in his eyes. Bloodshot and watery after a Saturday afternoon in the pub. It’s the type of face that I recognise as one of my own. I see my Dad in those eyes. I see my Scottish roots in these eyes. Seeing guys like this old boy come out the pub, as I sit with a coke and a bag of prawn cocktail.  Waiting. Hoping that I won’t be getting another coke because that’ll mean my grandparents will be having another libation before driving me home.  The old boy reminds me of The Auld Brig……fag smoke, old wrinkled skin. Hands that have seen work in the pit or the paper mill. A half-n-a-nip on the special OAP deal x 10. Bookies slips and the horse racing on in the corner.  Half-truthful stories being pedalled to anyone who will listen and maybe the odd argument or someone falling off a bar stool. Women with blue eye liner and pink lipstick, Charlie perfume telling me I’m a handsome lad, even though I’m fat n ginger. That’s what photographs can do!