Take them or leave them
Selina Mills
Judging from the queues of excited crowds straggling round the dreary, drizzleswept Trafalgar Square last week, it would appear that the National Portrait Gallery is on to something. Not only has the launch of its new exhibition Mario Testino: Portraits appeared to have tapped into the public's craving for celebrity and gloss, but the gallery itself has received the type of media frenzy usually reserved for the arrival of a new pop idol or movie.
The exhibition — 120 portraits in colour and black-and-white of the rich and famous, ranging from Madonna to Diana, Princess of Wales, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss — is a wonderful blend of the sumptuous, the beautiful and the luxurious that most of us have access to only when diving into Hello! and Vogue at the dentist. The show has been open for only a week, and already rave reviews have been praising Mario's technique, subtlety and sensitivity, endorsing the gallery's own adoration of its new champion. 'There is meticulous preparation for the decisive moment when
the portrait is made ... ' croons the exhibition catalogue. 'This process is akin to that of cinema and theatre where the subjects are perfected and transformed into intensi
fied versions of themselves he follows in the tradition of Cecil Beaton.'
Please. Let's not get carried away here. It is true that entering the lavish world of Mario is a theatrical sensation in itself. There is something wonderfully seductive about standing before polished portraits of famous (and infamous) people who are staring straight at you. For one brief fantastical instant in the Madonna section, or in front of those famous images of Diana, Princess of Wales, it is possible to imagine that you have access to that person, and that you can have a tiny part of that world of smooth surfaces and flawlessness.
There is no doubt, too, that Testino is a superb photographer: he has the silky ability to disarm his subjects and make them relax into the camera's eye — Prince Charles looks elegant but approachable feeding his chickens; Robbie Williams looks naughty but nice peeking through his Union Jack knickers; and dear Gwyneth Paltrow seems graceful and airy floating in her spectrum of light. There is the pervading sense, too, as you glide around the rooms, that should Testino deign to focus his lens on you, you too would look your best. This man knows what he is doing — he lets his photos flatter and charm, and you sense how much he enjoys his work.
Testino, to give him credit, has never claimed to be a great artist, or a chronicler of life. 'I am a fashion photographer,' he has said on many occasions, and in a documentary by the BBC admitted he himself did not know where to place his portraits in terms of art. But disturbingly, watching the
sycophancy surrounding him, much of it from the stars themselves who allow him to photograph them, you would think this was the launch of a major art retrospective of someone who has changed the way we think about art and portraiture. He has not.
Instead, what the National Portrait Gallery has tapped into, apart from entertaining us for a very few popcorn moments, is selling products (Testino and the National Portrait Gallery) — and perpetuating the products the magazines were selling in the first place: clothes, make-up, an album or the stars themselves. Amusingly, none of the photos has labels, except in a discreet exhibition guide you are handed when walking in, presumably because we are supposed to know who all these 'products' are. Note, too, that the show itself is sponsored by Burbern,, Vogue and Dom Perignon. These are products most of us take or leave depending on our whims and tastes.
This is not to say that these portraits are not ravishing, flattering and very entertaining. But most people sashaying through this exhibition will forget them very quickly when they go home, in the same manner we most likely forget last month's Vogue and Hello!. The photos are intriguing for the products they are selling. But they should remain in the world to which they belong — glossy, luxury magazines which have never pretended to be anything other than glossy, luxury magazines which sell products.
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