BP Portrait Award 2016

(The National Portrait Gallery, 25 June 2016)

People prefer to see the world in terms of the units they have evolved to understand best: other people. Thus, the primitive people identified the forces of nature with the wills of anthropomorphic gods. Later, somewhat less primitive people conferred human characteristics on ethnicities and nation states and then dedicated their lives to serving the super-human narrative. Today, methodological individualism---the belief that the best way to understand how individuals act as a group is to understand how individuals act individually---is the methodology of choice in the (better) social sciences. (The rather compelling selfish-gene alternative is acknowledged.)

The captivation with the individual is the theme of the Exhibition. The most interesting subject is the one caught in the mid-narrative of his own life or about to disrupt the viewer's life (typical for a portrait), preferably a future life (e.g., Joshua LaRock's Laura In Black or Fiona Graham-Mackay's Sir Andrew Motion) but possibly a past one (Martin Yeoman's Laurie Weedon's D-Day Glider Pilot or Laura Guoke's Petras), or in the mid of a social narrative (typical for candid photography). Intelligence (conveyed by the tentative, sceptical look) and beauty (in the gene of the beholder and conveyed by the countenance of one's beautiful wife, ugly wife, a child, or oneself) evoke the presumption of a narrative.

The London art scene is a single conversation whose goal is to understand the world a little better and nudge it a little forward.