The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture

A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits, teeth. Suck it in, push ’em out, show your pearly whites. Leaving aside David LaChapelle’s portrait of Pamela Anderson, there’s a shortage of Ts in Phillip Prodger’s Face Time. This looks likea coffee-table book but doesn’t bark like a coffee-table book. On first flick through, I found the pictures desultory, even depressing. I was expecting more of a Condé Nast vibe. Glossy and glossier. On second approach, taking text and pictures together, it became a more interesting beast.

Prodger is a former head of photography at the National Portrait Gallery and the founding Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He has thought deeply about photography and portraiture in all its masks and guises. This isn’t the usual greatest hits album, a book to idle through one afternoon between Christmas and New Year. There are no photographs by His Royal Airbrushness Mario Testino. Where the big names do appear, it is often in uncharacteristic costume. Cecil Beaton is represented not by Audrey Hepburn, but by a charlady. In a series of three photographs, ‘From Charwoman to Dowager’, taken in the 1930s, Beaton reveals the retoucher’s art. A dumpy subject is transformed into a slender duchess. The middle photo is annotated with Beaton’s commands from the dark room: ‘lighten hair’, ‘make face symmetric & young’ and so on.

Prodger points to a paradox: most cameras are set to take a photograph in 1/60th of a second. ‘Considering there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and 27,000 days in the average lifespan, this means a single photograph might capture just 1/140 billionth of a person’s time on Earth.’