Cheese!

I've spent the weekend looking at portrait photography from the 1980s. Not something I have previously been interested in but remarkably enjoyable. Let me tell you how I came to be doing this.

I was fortunate to be invited to lunch at the House of Lords last week. My host was delayed and so I waited in the small area in the cloakroom where there are a few chairs placed for this purpose. 

A lady was sitting opposite and as she looked up I mentioned that I thought she was wearing a fine pair of spectacles. She said that was thinking the same about mine, a Theo frame called soixant cinq in a white/grey tortoiseshell. It turned out we both had a spectacle habit although hers (60 frames) was not quite as bad as mine (I've lost count). 

Her name was Gemma and she was a photographer. She had published several books and worked extensively with the late Henry Moore, the famous sculptor. Moore of course has a strong connection to my home town of Leeds and indeed this lady had visited Leeds on many occasions. 

But as we got on to discussing the photography in more detail it turned out that this was someone I had read about in one of the Sunday magazines. She was Gemma Levine, who had photographed anyone who was anyone. It was amazing to meet someone who had taken portraits of so many people who had made history and many of them no longer with us.  

Back home I had a look on Amazon to see what of her work was available in print. I was amazed to find a second hand copy of Faces of the 80s for just 1p. The book arrived in time for the weekend. It is so interesting to see the great and the good photographed 30 years or so ago. Alan Sugar appears adjacent to Robert Maxwell. How both fortunes have changed in the intervening years. Sir Ralph Halpern on £1m per year and before his well publicised misdemeanours. Joan Collins described as a role model for women over forty. A young Rowan Atkinson with notes written by Jeffrey Archer I suspect that if this book were to be reissued in the first decade of the next century, his would be a name that would survive and would, indeed, be enhanced.  How true.

So I am grateful for my host turning up late and once again for my spectacles being an ice breaker with a complete stranger. I have discovered an art form I never would have looked twice at before.

Just before leaving I used the facilities - in bold letters on the door is states "Peers Only". That certainly makes you think!