Hold Still, National Portrait Gallery: heart-wrenching accounts of ordinary lives in the time of Covid
4/5
This new photographic exhibition - conceived by the Duchess of Cambridge - bring back very raw memories of a difficult six months
By Alastair Sooke, CHIEF ART CRITIC
14 September 2020 • 12:01am
Brace yourself. Grab some tissues. Because today the National Portrait Gallery launches Hold Still, an online exhibition featuring 100 photographs taken by ordinary people during lockdown.
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While works by professional photographers did make the final cut (frankly, they stand out), this isn’t a conventional fine-art exhibition. Indeed, dozens of images are – in a technical sense – weak or flawed. Few, though, are forgettable. The judges weren’t bothered about aesthetic issues such as composition or lighting. Instead, they wanted emotion – often heart-wrenching, sometimes uplifting – and a sense of real lives being experienced by real people.
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Is there a single image that sums up Britain’s lockdown in the way that, say, documentary photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange captured the Great Depression? I’m not sure there is – in part, because lockdown, initially understood as a great leveller, turned out to affect people in profoundly different, and unequal, ways. Consider the myriad characters we encounter in Hold Still. A bright-eyed girl claps enthusiastically on a Thursday night. An exhausted nightshift worker in Wales seems on the brink of collapse. What do they have in common with the 17-year-old twins afflicted with ennui, trapped behind a window’s mottled glass?
That said, there is one image I can’t shake which hints at universality: Hayley Evans's Forever Holding Hands shows a close-up of the interlaced hands of an elderly couple, married for more than seven decades, clutching each other tight from adjoining hospital beds. Here is devotion – and solace: after contracting the virus, they died five days apart. It’s a simple thing, touch – but a primal one, too, denied in recent months. “What will survive of us is love,” wrote Larkin, at the end of “An Arundel Tomb”. I so hope he’s right.
