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Face to Face AUTUMN 2005 My Favourite Portrait by Alan Titchmarsh SELF PORTRAIT Renaissance to Contemporary New Associate level of Gallery Membership Special discounted tours of the Garrick Club From the Director Following the success of Dean Marsh in this year’s BP Portrait Award, it will be fascinating to see who comes through as the winner of the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize. Last year we had nearly 3,000 entrants, and we expect a similar entry again, mixing well-known professional photographers with very talented amateurs who have developed the ability to produce a really striking portrait image. The new Audio Guide has been launched, offering fascinating insights into the Gallery’s Collection. Whether visiting with friends or on your own, I hope you will find the stories and commentaries in the guide to be completely engaging. Do please let me have COVER your comments. Self-portrait with Love and Death (detail) I do hope you will consider becoming an Associate of the Gallery. This new level of by Hans Thoma, 1875 support offers wonderful opportunities for enjoying even more events and activities Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe at the Gallery – as well as giving financial support to our new commissioned portraits. In the next issue of Face to Face we will give details of the special programmes being planned for the Gallery’s 150th Anniversary year in 2006. The ideas are developing well – I look forward to sharing the excitement. Sandy Nairne DIRECTOR MY FAVOURITE HORATIO NELSON always figures on my guest list PORTRAIT whenever I’m asked by a newspaper or magazine to come up with my imagined line-up for a dream dinner Alan Titchmarsh party. I mean, who could resist the company of a vain, self-centred clergyman’s son from Norfolk who was small of stature but gigantic of personality? I’ve never found arrogance or abundant self- confidence attractive traits, but somehow I think I could forgive Nelson, who was frequently accused of both. He thought he was always right, but then history, in the main, seemed to agree. He was an adventurer, a romantic, a great strategist or tactician (I’m never sure which) and a man who Alan Titchmarsh was the main loved wearing his decorations (clearly the sign of a presenter of Gardeners’ World crushing inferiority complex, say the psychoanalysts). and the hugely popular Ground Force, and has also presented So why could I possibly think that Nelson would be How To Be A Gardener, British good company? Because of Sir William Beechey’s Isles – A Natural History and portrait of him. Look at the eyes: deep-set and most recently The 20th Century sparkling. The face has sensitivity, vulnerability and Roadshow. He writes regularly implacability in equal measure. I like to think that in BBC Gardeners’ World you can judge people by appearances, and so I’m Magazine and Radio Times, as well as being gardening happy to go along with Beechey’s interpretation of NELSON: BEFORE AND AFTER TRAFALGAR correspondent of the Daily the great Admiral. Until 11 December 2005 Express and Sunday Express. Room 16 In 2004 he received the Here is a man with an enormous capacity to love – The events surrounding Nelson’s death at the Victoria Medal of Honour, the rather too frequently, maybe – and a capacity to Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 tend to dominate his highest accolade in the British inspire affection in others – be they delicate, sensitive popular memory today. This display of prints gardening world. He lives in women, or tough and brutish sailors aboard the highlights other milestones in his career, and Hampshire with his wife and Victory. A man’s man, and a lady’s man. examines changes in his posthumous reputation. family in an old farmhouse with a two-acre garden. Should the National Portrait Gallery ever tire of ABOVE Beechey’s portrait of Nelson, I’d be happy to give it Photo © Jonathan Buckley Horatio Nelson, Viscount Nelson a temporary home over my mantelpiece – this year by Sir William Beechey, 1800 above all others. THE CREATION DEFYING OF A NEW DISTANCE: COMMISSION PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM BROOMBERG AND OLIVER CHANARIN 14 June –25 September 2005 Room 40 Supported by Deloitte THIS PROJECT WAS a gift for a corporate portrait Their brief was to make a set of portraits that worked Anne Braybon is a creative junkie. As art director on Management Today together as a series as well as individual images that consultant who has been magazine I had been immersed in commissioning would eventually go into the photographs collection. responsible for researching and commissioning two photographic business portraiture for more than six years, and had They were asked to develop a visually sophisticated portrait exhibitions for the Gallery become intrigued by the corporate image. But my way of referring to the industry that binds the as part of our contemporary work had been for the printed page and Defying sitters together – but how do you show what people photography displays in partnership Distance was a project for the Gallery wall and the do when what they do is in their head? with Deloitte. As an editorial art Collection, a prospect that seemed to magnify the director she has worked in Etymology provided the key. Broomberg and challenge that the business sector presents, as well Amsterdam, Paris and London, Chanarin checked that tele was Greek for ‘distant’, on magazines, books, and as the possibilities of doing something remarkable and suggested making two landscape photographs, newspapers, developing, job by with it. each of a beacon, to represent the earliest form of job, a passion for photography My brief was clear: to research potential sitters, communicating across a distance, which would hang and illustration. propose photographers, and commission between on opposite walls. It was a brilliant solution, and a bold twelve and sixteen portraits of people who had played departure for the Gallery to take a conceptual TOPFROM LEFT a significant part in the British telecommunications approach and include landscapes in a display. Hans Snook Founder of Orange industry. This was the first group commission in the It took four months and fine dovetailing of sitters’ Gallery’s partnership with Deloitte, which centres on Stephen Carter and photographers’ diaries to set up and complete the acquisition of portraits of leading figures in the CEO of Ofcom the shoots. The high point happened late one night worlds of business, commerce and public life, a sector Sir Tim Berners-Lee in April, when I heard, finally after weeks of email that is less well represented in its collection. The inventor of the World Wide Web exchange, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the To draw up a list of sitters I needed to define telecom- World Wide Web, had agreed to take part. by Adam Broomberg munications. The shape of the present industry had and Oliver Chanarin, 2005 The suggestion by Terence Pepper, Curator of been formed in the mid-1980s when telephones and Photographs, to box-frame the images and lower the computers converged. It was a period of ferment and lighting accentuated the ‘caravaggesque’ quality of remarkable people surfaced with a vision that was to the final prints. The flesh tones seem to light the be critical in driving the development of the industry. room. The sitters’ internal absorption, and the lack of Many of them are still alive. a direct gaze, create an extraordinarily meditative Two books, The Death of Distance by Frances atmosphere. Cairncross, which mapped the profound global impact Nothing prepared me for the thrill of the end result of the telecoms revolution on business, government and the powerful physical experience of standing in and society, and Francis Spufford’s The Backroom the gallery space surrounded by the portraits. Boys, with its Boys’ Own-style account of Racal’s race Broomberg and Chanarin have transformed a list of to win the second mobile phone licence, converted me names into a display that is compelling, considered from a dispassionate researcher to an ‘anorak’ who and beautiful. found telecommunications simply thrilling. I was determined that the list of sitters should cover its Anne Braybon breadth and include an engineer and a City analyst CONSULTANT AND ADMINISTRATOR FOR with the entrepreneurs, academics, regulators and PHOTOGRAPHIC GROUP PORTRAITS corporate stars. Telecoms is a male-dominated world and only two women, a politician and a commentator, survived on the rigorously cross-referenced list. FROM LEFT Critical to the success of the commission was the Charles Dunstone choice of photographer. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Co-founder of The Carphone Warehouse Chanarin have worked together as a seamless partnership for eight years, and the intelligence of David Ross their approach to their own projects and their interest Co-founder of The Carphone Warehouse in finding a visual solution to the telecommunications commission was convincing and exciting. by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, 2005 THE ARTIST FIVE YEARS AGO John Murdoch, then Director of the We found that we were interested in the way in which AS SUBJECT Courtauld Institute Galleries, introduced me to self-portraits connect with the viewer, conflating his or Anthony Bond of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, her position in front of the painting with that of the who outlined a plan for a major exhibition of self- artist facing the easel. We became convinced of the Joanne Woodall is Senior Lecturer portraits that would span the centuries, from the centrality of oil paint to the genre, both as a means of at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Renaissance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, creating a mirror-like illusion and as a medium that She specialises in early modern Netherlandish art and has written while there had been many exhibitions of self- could be manipulated and reworked, recording and widely on issues of portraiture and portraits focusing on different periods and places, signifying the process of creation.