By COMPTON MACKENZIE When to the sessions of sweet silent
thought I summon up remembrance of things past.
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. of being photographic, had the camera been invented in their time. Would they have blushed shamefully when some art critic armed cap-it-pie with the latest jargon pointed out that they had committed the sin of offering the world a speaking likeness of the unfortunate sitter who had surrendered to the temptation of being recognised by his friends?
I have not seen Mr. Graham Sutherland's portrait of Sir Winston Churchill and when I say that the impression it makes on me from reproductions in the Press is that somebody has pulled Sir Winston's legs out of the canvas and that he is asking, with intelligible annoyance. who the deuce did it. I may wish to retract that impression,when I see the original. I have yet to be convinced by some exponent of modern portrait- painting that it is great art for the painter to express himself at the cost of failing to express his sitter. Does the art of the portrait painter not demand the same approach to his subject as the art of the caricaturist to his, and why in straining to avoid the disgrace of being labelled photographic do so many modern painters prefer to be accused of caricature?
At the same time photographers strive to get their work compared with pictures. and with the aid of cunningly contrived lighting preserve a series of fleeting expressions on the faces of their sitters, a series in fact of glorified snapshots. Chance may decide that a superlative likeness is caught. but with all respect to the experts of portrait photography I shall maintain that they are too much at the mercy of the happy fluke. I have often discussed this question with contemporary masters, and many of them have argued that it is the inability of the average sitter to keep still for the requisite length of minutes or even seconds which compels them to use the technique they have perfected. • What has happened to us in the last fifty or sixty years that we are no longer capable of keeping our eyes and limbs steady enough for as long as the photographer requires such steadi- ness'? In Victorian days a large group of people old and young were individually capable of sustaining a pose long enough to leave behind those wonderful memorials of great occasions. Will posterity look with equal pleasure at the flashlight groups we shall leave behind us? It seems unlikely.
Three or four years ago I was giving a television talk of a quarter of an hour. Two cameras were in action, and the pro- ducer told me to turn from one to the other as I felt inclined.
I asked if there was any objection to my speaking all the time to the red eye of the camera immediately in front of me, because I felt I should lose the attention of every individual in that vast unseen audience if I turned away from him to speak. as it would seem, to somebody else. The producer said at onee that if I could keep my eyes fixed on the red eye of the camera in front it would be better.
'But,' he added. `so many people get embarrassed if they have to keep their eyes fixed on one person for a quarter of an hour.'
I assured him that I did not suffer from that sort of self- conscibusness and I was allowed to gaze steadily at the same red eye for the whole of my talk. But I have wandered away from those carte de visite size photographs for the restoration of which this 'Sidelight' was intended to plead. Naturally I should like them to resemble those delightful photographs with which old family albums are filled, but if they are now beyond the skill of the conte'mporary photographer, let me beg for small photographs taken with the help of any kind of luminous bulb. and for albums in which they can be kept. I do not want to be given a large studio portrait of a friend mounted upon an acre of cardboard for which he or she has had to pay at least a guinea and for which I shall have to find space in a drawer; I dislike framed photographs upon my walls or tables of even my dearest friends. Yet if they were modestly accommodated in an album I should from time to time turn over the pages with pleasure. Some will remind me that there is always the snapshot which can be pasted into an album. But they never will be pasted in an album. I have only to look at a bottle of paste for pro- crastination to seem the sweetest gift that life can offer.
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