Hold Still : A Portrait of Our Nation in 2020

Moving online exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery of 100 photographs of people taken during the first Covid lockdown. 

The works were a result of an open call for entries on three themes helpers and heroes, your new normal and acts  of kindness. from which 100 were picked by a committee led by the Duchess of Cambridge. 

The pictures are online with commentaries written by the photographer or subject and are very moving. If it’s not a cliché every picture tells a story. From the first picture “Glass Kisses” by Steph James of a baby holding a hand up to an old lady who kisses it on the other side of a window, I was hooked!

A number of pictures seem to have been taken as part of  projects such as Sarah Wood’s “Ruth, Danial and Scarlet in Lockdown” where she has photographer people around Lewes in a series on furloughed friendship and Kenny Glover’s “On Your Doorstep” part of a series of family portraits to fund raid for Marie Curie Hospices. 

Among some deeply moving images there also some funny ones such as a postman in fancy dress and some men in Stockport who dressed at Spiderman for their daily runs to amuse local children. 

I also did an online talk by the project lead, Denise Vogelsang, which outlined how the project was set up in record time, how it was launched and judged and what they hoped its legacy would be including showing the images around the country on billboards which was launched last week. 

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