ADVERTISING FEATURE Atta Yagub (right) with his brother. From the series A Scottish Family Portrait, by Verena Jaekel
MARK NEVILLE BETTY AT PORT GLASGOW TOWN HALL CHRISTMAS PARTY JOANNA KANE UNKNOWN WOMAN
'Betty' is one of a series of images I took at the Port Glasgow Town Hall in 2004. They used to hold raucous Christmas parties there over eight consecutive nights during the festive season. It became the front cover of a coffee table book of social documentary images of the town, which I had delivered exclusively to each of the eight thousand houses in the Port by the local boys football team. The book is not available anywhere else, commercially, by mail order, or otherwise (though it now occasionally appears on e-bay). I wanted to make a symbolic gift to Portonians, who at once became both the protagonists in, and recipients of, an artists' experiment. It is interesting to see the image seven years later re- contextualised as a large print in the Portrait Gallery. Its presence here, both as part of the National Galleries of Scotland collection, and now on display in the new Photography Gallery, plays a vital role in ensuring that the issues which the Port Glasgow Book Project raised about authorship, audience, and documentary practice in contemporary art continue to be discussed. Its inclusion in the show Romantic Camera, sensitively curated by Duncan Forbes, has given me a new way of thinking about the work. The exhibition not only helps to contextualise the work within the historical canon of photographic practice in Scotland, but it also generates new references and meanings for the image. For some reason I have received mountains of e-mails from Parisians about this image, and the question they ask most frequently is: 'What song is she dancing to?' I am delighted that this mysterious portrait of a woman, who has a haunting presence, but is completely unknown, is included in the new Portrait Gallery's photography exhibition Romantic Camera. The image appears 'romantic' at first sight, but masks more complex realities, relating to gender, surveillance and control. All we know of this woman is that the nineteenth century plaster cast of her features was labelled 'cautious type', a quality that the phrenologists associated with femininity. This image is one of my favourites from the series, and continues to fascinate me. Her image and presence sprang to life while I worked with it, and we feel that she might open her eyes at any moment. The image comes from the photographic series, The Somnambulists, which aimed to release the subjects of the casts from the categories and hierarchies of the phrenological head collection, using photography, lighting and digital imaging, to give a suggestion of living presence. In relation to the theme of romanticism and photography, we think of photography and its Victorian origins, but in many senses photography was 'dreamed up' within the era of Romanticism. The phrenological casts, life masks and death masks, created as 'evidence' to back up the pseudo- science of phrenology in the early nineteenth century, were a kind of early precursor to photography.