great photographic portraits #3



This portrait of the Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was taken in 1996 by my friend Robin Gillanders at Little Sparta, Finlay's world-famous garden in the hills south of Edinburgh. It's not ideally suited to reproducing at this size because it's hard to see the glowering expression on Finlay's face - an expression which, having met him myself on a couple of occasions, seems quite appropriate. He's a retiring man, but he can be as prickly as a thistle, and he doesn't much like being photographed. The very fact that Robin managed to coax him into a boat on a pond in his garden on a cold March morning is an indication of his respect for Robin as a fellow artist. Robin has been taking portraits for 25 years and told me recently that he feels he has only taken 'six good ones', and that this is one of them. He's being modest, of course, but this is certainly one of my own favourites. In his book 'The Photographic Portrait' Robin says this about it:

"The idea at conception was that there should be a reference to the sea and boats, since this is one of his [Finlay's] major themes. Also that the boat should be his smallest, as a reference to his 'small boy' hobby of making model boats. The background was to be a relatively wild part of the garden, drawing a relationship between nature and culture, which is another of his underlying themes. In retrospect, the portrait suggests other metaphors. Ian occupies a small space in the frame, implying isolation and solitariness - as an internationally exhibited artist largely unknown in his own country at that time and historically at odds with the art establishment, and as someone who, in 25 years, had never left the immediate environment of his garden."

A couple of things I particularly like are the out-of-focus rushes in the foreground which, to my way of thinking, place the viewer in the position of a voyeur, and the fact that there's a sense of movement, as if the figure in the boat has been caught passing through the scene - and would much rather have been obscured behind the branches to the right than exposed in the centre of the frame. You feel that with one pull on the oars he'll slip out of view.