Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize

After recently visiting London's National Portrait Gallery back in March of this year, within the galleries' gift-shop I discovered a hardback copy of the results of the galleries' recent "Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize" which was on show from the 8th of November last year up to February of this year. The work on show in this book stood out to me so much, that I had to buy myself a copy from online. Recently, as I have just started a new project for my University course that relates to portraiture. This book was a great source of research towards gaining knowledge of what a portrait is and about.

When you think of portraiture, a lot of questions regarding the topic in general come to mind if you look close enough. To what degree do we perform in front of a camera when being photographed?, What makes a good portrait?, among other questions.

Fig One: Spencer Murphy - Laurie

One portrait that caught my eye in particular from this book was a portrait from the work of the British Photographer "Spencer Murphy" entitled "Laurie" from his body of work "The abyss gazes into you". The way that the portrait has been structured has been done in a way that makes us the audience try and  pay attention to compelling appearance of the subject being photographed.  What is so strong about the subjects compelling appearance is the way that the subject staring away from the camera in what looks like a form of trance. The strong contrast within this portrait comes from the scarring around the subjects mouth and the smoothness of the sitter's head and skin. Through all of these features, there is an idea of a phycological look and feel to how they subject has been represented. According to Spencer Murphy, the marks visible on the sitters face come from some surgery that the sitter had after an accident. What I find interesting about this is that before reading any background information on this portrait, I the viewer got the impression that courtesy of the subjects portrayal through his gaze along with the marks on his face. My initial thought was that the subject might have been in some form of physical altercation in order to look the way he does. It's this kind of idea of studying portraits in detail that make's them more stronger.

Fig Two : Spencer Murphy - Ruby Walsh (2013)            

Fig Three: Rineke Dijkstra - Bull Fighters from Vila Franca de Xira and Montemor o Novo in Portugal





















Upon looking more into Spencer Murphy's work, I can't help but compare some of his work to the work of Rineke Dijkstra and her Bullfighters series. An example of this is through one of Spencer Murphy's most recent portraits which he produced produced for a commercial based assignment for advertising the 2013 Grand National on Channel 4. Within Rineke Dijkstra's portraits, the art of performance can be seen within her work. Her Bullfighters series in particular because of how her subjects have been photographed after taking part in an event.

Sources


 http://spencermurphy.tumblr.com/
http://www.spencermurphy.co.uk/#/portfolio
Book: Rineke Dijkstra - A Retrospective
http://www.npg.org.uk/photoprize1/site12/index.php