A picture is more than just words

THIS year's National Photographic Portrait Prize presents an interesting range of images even if, as usual, the artists' statements are sometimes rather annoying.

Cary Fukunaga and Jamie Bell

THIS year's National Photographic Portrait Prize presents an interesting range of images even if, as usual, the artists' statements are sometimes rather annoying.

It's not just that they inevitably fall into habits of flabby thinking acquired at art school, such as using the term concept for ideas or phenomena that aren't concepts, or notion in cases where the thinking is even murkier. More deeply, it's the very idea of an artist's statement that is questionable.

Only bad art starts with concepts and notions and set ideas that can be packaged as slogans. Artists who are any good think imaginatively and concretely and pursue intuitions that arise in the imagination and crystallise in the handling of their medium.

What artists say in commentary on their own work is, for them, a kind of meta-thinking, and the result is more often turgid than enlightening. Thus at the beginning of the exhibition, in a group of pictures broadly dealing with childhood and adolescence, there is a large colour photograph of a teenage boy by Lia Steele. It is an attractive enough work, although too big - you have to ask yourself what you would do with a photograph of this size - and burdened with a rather verbose explanation of the artist's intention.

In contrast, the smaller black-and-white photograph of another young boy by Vittoria Dussoni does all this better and - because she keeps her remarks to a minimum - without deflating the sensitive and imaginative effect through trite verbalisation.

The winner this year is Miss Alesandra, a fine portrait by Jacqueline Mitelman that works because it is thoughtfully conceived as a pictorial composition. If we imagine the pictorial space divided in four by cutting it in half at the vertical and horizontal midpoints, we will see that the face is located in the upper right quarter.

The composition is basically a classic one, but dislocated by this shifting of the head so far to the right, which emphasises the mass of darkness on the left.

The effect is to suggest a weight of melancholy consonant with the handsome but slightly weary features of the sitter.

Again, if we imagine the composition divided by the two diagonals of the rectangle, we will find that the face is set entirely within the upper right triangle, while the other diagonal defines the general angle of the body and runs through the right eye.

The care taken with the composition is matched by the attention to the colour palette, at once rich and subdued: the blacks and the white of the sitter's hair and the background are relieved by the muted red of the costume, more faintly echoed in the red of the lips.

Another striking picture whose secret is partly geometrical and partly chromatic is Louis Petruccelli's portrait Katsuya. If we divide the composition by its two diagonals, we realise that his head is located in the V-shaped space above their meeting point. The figure is set in his home or studio, and the visual interest of pictures and furniture is subordinated to a strong sense of chiaroscuro.

An almost monochrome palette, dominated by the black of the sitter's hair and of the shadows, and the white of his shirt, is echoed in the black-and-white piano keyboard in the background.

Greg Weight's small portrait of Shen Jiawei and his wife and daughter, Wang Lan, Xini, Shen Jiawei and Billy, also stands out. The photographer has emulated the painter's palette of earth colours and has set him in front of a painted self-portrait in his studio.

But while the artist wears jeans and leather jacket for Weight, he appears in his own painting in traditional Chinese costume, executing a Sargent-like full-length portrait of Princess Mary of Denmark.

The contextual information provided by costume and setting has always been an important part of portrait painting and the lack of it can impoverish or strip away a sitter's identity.

Thus David Young's portrait of Bob Hawke, although relatively small, is more than twice life-size and cropped back to the facial features, sacrificing most of the former prime minister's distinctive mass of white hair while emphasising the blemishes of age on his complexion. The photographer claims he finds Hawke undiminished by the passage of time, but his work seems intent on proving the contrary.

The exhibition ends with several pictures of birth and death that are moving - in one case intolerably painful - but that go beyond the strict bounds of portraiture as the record of a living adult person. The full scope of portraiture, many works in the exhibition implicitly recognise, begins with adolescence.

Children become more interesting as they approach that age, as we see in Sarah Rhodes's portrait of her son as a hunter.