What makes great portrait photography?
Last summer’s Stardust – the David Bailey retrospective on the Mound – left this reviewer cold. So too does the hugely acclaimed Jason Bell’s work now on show at Gayfield Creative Spaces as part of the Retina Scottish International Photography Festival 2016.
To my mind, both collude in, rather than comment upon, the cult of celebrity. I don’t trust their occasional moments of apparent candour.
Nor am I convinced by Kareem Black’s tattooed models, also at Gayfield, strutting and stomping their stuff against a staged background of club grunge and inner-city graffiti.
Hot and noisy
Instead, what really bursts from the walls here – honking and roaring, redolent of drains, diesel fumes and street food – are Dougie Wallace’s studies of Indian ‘road wallahs’.
Glasgow-raised Wallace made 17 visits over four years to photograph Mumbai’s Padmini cabs, ‘falling for their garish, psychedelic interiors and the elusive charisma of the drivers’.
What emerge are heat, humour, and occasionally horrified passengers – humanity squeezed into focus at crossroads and traffic lights, caught in the glare of flashguns, sweating in the cramped confines of these ‘Bollywood disco bars on wheels’.
The contrast with Bell’s air-brushed A-listers and Black’s stroppy mannequins could not be greater. The combination of the three here is an inspired collision of styles, techniques, and interests. I thoroughly recommend it.—AM
The show continues at Gayfield Creative Spaces, 11 Gayfield Square, 10am–5pm until 30 July.
