The World’s Most Photographed at The National Portrait Gallery

Date: 31-07-2005
Owning Institution: National Portrait Gallery, London
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012      
Subject:   20th Century    

To judge by the long, snaking queue of people waiting to see “The World’s Most Photographed”, its current exhibition is one of the National Portrait Gallery’s most visited. The small and rather cramped suite of galleries in which the museum has chosen to display the photographs that make up the show – pictures of ten somewhat arbitrarily selected royals, politicians, Hollywoodites and sports stars – is partly to blame for the congestion. So too is the fact that many of the pictures in question, especially the earliest photographs, a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pictures of Queen Victoria and Gandhi, are small and intimate objects which require close scrutiny to be appreciated at all. Seeing the exhibition is an uncomfortable experience, rather like visiting a series of shrines erected to an unusual array of secular saints and having to jostle for position, among the throng of other pilgrims, for a view of their precious remains. But this does in itself reveal a kind of truth about the nature of its contents

Sandy Nairne, director of the NPG, writes in his foreword to the show’s catalogue that “The aim of The World’s Most Photographed is to bring overlooked photographic portraits to public attention, and to demonstrate the way in which photography and modern history are now inseparable… This connects with part of the National Portrait Gallery’s mission, to explore portraiture in all its forms , seeking a wider understanding of how portraiture plays its part within cultural history.” That sounds suspiciously like an attempt to lend a cynically populist, attendance-boosting exercise – complete with BBC TV tie-in – the semblance of intellectual dignity. But the exhibition is interesting none the less and does, to a limited extent, justify the arguments made on its behalf. It contains rather too many pictures of film stars – whose true celebrity, after all, is projected by the moving rather than the still image – and seems to fix its gaze rather too exclusively on the creation of American celebrity. But it also plots a number of suggestive pathways between photographic portraiture and modern historical preconception. The photograph is, after all, one of the modern world’s principal mechanisms for the creation of a shared mythology. Every photograph represents a slice of time in the life of a particular individual, while potentially elevating that snatched instant of someone’s existence into a symbol of universally graspable ideals and aspirations. At its most potent, it combines the talismanic properties of the relic with the transformative capacities of art.

The first of the show’s ten miniature shrines is one of the most interesting, in that it shows its subject, Queen Victoria, visibly struggling to understand and harness the potential of a medium that was still in its infancy when she came to the throne. One of the earliest pictures of her, taken by William Edward Kilburn in 1852, preserves her frustration more vividly than it records her appearance. As the photographer activated the shutter of his camera, the queen, surrounded by her children, involuntarily closed her eyes. The print reveals this but the surviving metal plate of the daguerrotype shows her only as a blur of fine white lines. That is because she used her thumbnail to scratch out her own offending image. The result is a kind of non-portrait of her, but one visibly inscribed with her own discontent.

The inability of early photographs to capture the human form in movement was to have a significant effect on images of Victoria and, as a consequence, on her image in the larger sense – since the release of so-called “cartes de visite”, bearing her likeness, became one of the principal means by which she became known to her subjects. During the early years of her reign, influenced by Prince Albert, she sought to foster informal representations of her and her family. Both she and Albert instinctively understood that by presenting themselves as affectionate and loving parents – almost ordinary people, albeit ones of royal blood – they might deflect the revolutionary energies seething across mid-nineteenth century Europe and active, in Britain, in the rise of Chartism. But the photograph was not, at the time, a medium especially well adapted to the creation of such a public image. In an age of inordinately long exposures, even reasonably well behaved children emerged from the process somewhat blurred by their own fidgeting; and the same is true of Victoria herself, in one photograph of her as Albert’s loving bride, taken in her wedding gown. At times, the problems posed by the medium produced memorable instances of unintentional comedy. In W & D Downey’s picture of Victoria with her favourite dog, Sharp, she appears almost to be throttling the creature in an attempt to keep it still for the camera. Such pictures seem to bear out the truth of the old adage concerning the inadvisability of working with children and animals. It was only in paintings, especially those painted of the royal family, before Albert’s death, by Edwin Landseer, that the pose of regal informality was successfully transmitted – but that lies outside the province of this particular show.

After Albert’s death, Victoria finally made her own kind of accomodation with photography, although not before the camera had preserved the extent of her grief in a sequence of disconcertingly revealing images. John Mayall’s photograph of her with the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, taken on their wedding day, is the most disquieting of such pictures. The young couple stand, facing one another, while Victoria sits between them, seemingly oblivious to their presence as she fixes her gaze on a marble bust of her beloved late consort. She comes across as a kind of royal Miss Haversham, absorbed in her own grief. It was only in her later years that she managed to create an appropriately regal image for herself, making the most of her increased bulk to pose for the series of pictures that would ultimately fix her for posterity – a redoubtable figure in black, the emblematic Mother of Empire, as imposing and monumental as Rodin’s statue of Balzac.

Few of the other sections of the show have quite the same richness as that devoted to Victoria, but the pictures of Gandhi, placed second in this eccentric top-ten chart, are also fascinating. They show how preciently sensitive he was to the potential of the photograph to broadcast his values, especially that of passive resistance, across the world. He was initially suspicious of Margaret Bourke-White, when she went to India to photograph him in 1946, living among the “Untouchables”, but allowed her to take his picture none the less. Seated in an evidently humble interior, beside the spinning wheel that symbolised his resistance to British control of the Indian textile industry, he reads his papers and projects the perfect image of modern-day ascetic sainthood. It is just one example, among many, of the way in which Gandhi understood the value of the photo-opportunity more fully than any other politician of his time. In response to the imposition of the infamous salt tax of 1930, he made a 200-mile pilgrimage to the sea, to gather lumps of salt for himself on the coast. The photographs that he arranged to be taken had an enormous political impact, but their influence did not stop there. They are, among other things, the most direct antecedents for a whole tradition of photographically recorded artists’s “actions”, epitomised by the work of Joseph Beuys, arguably the most influential artist of post-war Germany. Gandhi remarked that “my life is my message”, and the images of himself that he sanctioned and promoted reached into all corners of life. There is even a trace element of Bourke-White’s picture of him embedded in the Indian flag itself – a diagrammatic image of the spinning wheel immortalised in her picture, floating on the white stripe that separates the orange and green stripes which respectively symbolise the nation’s Hindus and Muslims.

Such photographs are indeed part of “modern history”, and so are those of Adolf Hitler, who famously trained as an artist and who took a strong interest in the images that were used to propagate his distorted vision of the world. The contrast between the exhibited photographs of him, and those of Gandhi, is as might be expected upsettingly unpleasant. Most striking among them is a series of pictures of the Fuhrer practising his crazed oratory, a diminutive uniformed figure with that characteristic, mean little moustache of his, striking a series of absurd poses that he presumably imagined might give him the gravitas of a modern Cicero. They were taken by a gifted photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, but no amount of lighting and composition can disguise the fundamental moral and physical ugliness of the subject. Some things cannot be dignified by the camera, no matter how artful its operator. Bad politics, bad photographic art.

John F. Kennedy is the only other politician deemed worthy of inclusion in the exhibition, which, as a result, rather swiftly subsides into a series of celebrity photo-calls. The usual American suspects are all there – Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley – augmented by Greta Garbo and Audrey Hepburn. The latter seems an odd choice given that the late Princess Diana, who was surely photographed at least as often, and whose pictures have more interesting historical resonance, has been omitted.

The show comes back to life at its conclusion, with a tremendous series of pictures of Mohammad Ali in his pomp. Neil Leifer’s extraordinary photograph of Ali, still Cassius Clay, taken from 80 feet above the Houston Astrodome at the moment when he knocked out Cleveland Williams, must count as one of the most extraordinary sporting photographs ever taken. Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote about the “decisive moment” and this is about as decisive as it gets. Williams has contrived to collapse on his back at a perfect diagonal to one corner of the ring, while Ali celebrates in the opposite corner. Even the dangling microphone, which seems to punctuate the gestures of the referee as he counts out the defeated pugilist, could not have been more eloquently arranged.

But what comes across most vividly from the assembled pictures of Ali, and especially those where he is caught off guard, or off the cuff, is the sheer warmth and vitality and humanity of the man. These might not be photographs of a political figure, but they feel part of history in a way that pictures of Garbo, or Monroe, somehow do not. By capturing Ali’s charisma and physical heroism these are images that succeeded, in their own small but distinct way, in making the world a better place.