Full House

You may recall an earlier version of the image above which I posted in 2015. Yes, that is indeed me photographed five years ago, before losing a lot of weight and finally remembering to take off my Christmas-cracker crown. I called it "King of Fools", which seemed appropriate [1]. It was just a bit of fun, but I found the concept interesting, and it lodged itself in the back of my mind; essentially, the inverted pairing of a "court" card, plus associated playing-card paraphernalia. So, a while ago I started playing around with portraits of friends and family to produce a little set of similar "cards", all variants on the same format.

One thing this exercise revealed to me was quite how reluctant most of the people I know are to be photographed: I had to make the most of the few suitable "portraits" I could find, which were very thin on the ground. It's curious, in what is supposed to be a "selfie" culture, obsessed with the self-image, that I mainly seem to know representatives of the most camera-shy subset of the population. To an extreme degree, in certain cases. I can never decide whether this is due to vanity, love of or need for privacy, some sort of atavistic "soul stealing" thing, or just a reflex curmudgeonliness. Probably "all of the above" (yes, looking at you, Nick B.). Whatever the reason, I seem to have an extraordinary collection of pictures of people grimacing, glaring, blinking, flinching, fleeing the scene, or offering various apotropaic hand and finger gestures.

This reminded me that, back in the 90s, there was a corporate fashion for displaying galleries of staff portraits in open public view – more like "mugshots", really – with the intention that the relevant person could easily be identified (as if staff spent their days hanging about anonymously in public areas, hopefully waiting to be recognised and of use to someone). The real motivation behind this, of course, was to show an open and friendly institutional face towards clients and customers: this is us, here we are, we have no reason to hide! We did try this in the university library at Southampton, but it was never popular – it seems many people dislike their own appearance, quite rightly in some cases – and in the end it was abandoned, not least because it exposed the younger, more attractive members of staff to unwanted attention from our creepier clients. It seemed some of us, at any rate, had good reason to want to remain anonymous.

When I retired in 2014, I decided to draw up a list of all the members of staff, past and present, who had worked for me in one capacity or another, and was surprised to discover there had been over 50 of them. Quite a few had gone on to greater things – in fact, our most recent University Librarian had been one of my team in her younger days – but I found it hard to put faces to a surprising number of those names. I wished I had thought to make a photographic record, perhaps in the form of periodic "team photographs". It would have been easy to do, but I didn't, and it's obviously not one of those things you can do in retrospect. But the fun I could be having now with those fifty-plus faces... That's a whole deck of cards!

Anyway, I'll be dealing out a few more of the cards I have been able to make over the next couple of posts, not least because I'm going to be away from my workstation a lot: the weather has improved dramatically, and there are places to go, people to see, etc. I will be moderating comments, however, so do let me know if you think I've laid out a winning hand, or if you think I should fold on this game.

1. The banner carries a runic inscription, to be found below a window in Bristol Cathedral, which is said to mean something like "man is but a heap of mouldering dust", which, if nothing else, is quite a good description of a hangover.