In the book “Couples and Loneliness,” from 1999, Nan Goldin reflects on the years she spent taking pictures of her friends, a band of queer couples, drag queens, and misfit artists who inhabited downtown Manhattan in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. By the time of her writing, many of her subjects had died of AIDS. “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough,” she wrote. “In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” It’s a powerful compulsion—to take photographs of our loved ones in order to hold them close—and it hasn’t gone away during these months when we cannot physically be together. Take the recent work of Jesse Glazzard, a twenty-five-year-old artist based in London, who has been taking remote portraits of their friends using FaceTime. Glazzard, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” is from Yorkshire, in the north of England, but, when the pandemic arrived in the U.K., they decided to stay in London with their girlfriend, Nora. They had a kind of family in the city to look after: a community of young L.G.B.T.Q. people, many of whom Glazzard had met while shooting a series from 2018, “Queer Letters,” in which they captured their subjects alongside notes to their younger selves.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Glazzard had been shooting regularly for the British magazine i-D and had done their first editorial for Vogue Italia. “At the start of the year, I felt like my career was just taking off,” they told me. In March, as their gigs evaporated, they had the idea to start a personal project, shooting their friends remotely—“an adaptation to the times.” The first portrait they made was of a friend named Alice, who showed up for her digital session wearing a frilly pink cotton dress. Glazzard asked Alice to take them on a virtual tour of her mother’s Glasgow apartment, before settling on shooting in the bedroom. “If I was there, it would be the same, scoping out the light and backgrounds,” they said. The resulting image is starkly composed—with Alice perched on her bed, staring directly at the lens from behind angular brown bangs—but it also has a sense of humor about its formal constraints. Glazzard left their desktop background visible at the edges of the frame; in the upper right-hand corner, per FaceTime’s formatting, a small box shows a reflection of Glazzard, their hair close-cropped and bright orange, with Nora beside them.
Artists including their own images within photographs of someone else is not new: think of Jeff Wall’s “Picture for Women,” simultaneously a depiction of a female subject and of the male photographer’s gaze. All portraiture is a collaboration between photographer and subject, but shooting remotely, Glazzard said, shifts the power somewhat from the viewer to the viewed. Because the subjects of Glazzard’s photos are alone when they are photographed and style themselves for the shoots, the resulting images are somewhere between selfies and formal portraits. One friend chose to pose in a lace gown and giant pink bunny slippers, another with a boom box on their lap. There is a sense of performative grandeur to the compositions; one subject stares over her shoulder while swaddled in orange ruffled fabric, looking like a Vermeer painting come to life. “Sometimes it almost feels as if they’re doing a self-portrait, with a director at hand,” Glazzard said.
For Glazzard and their friends, the photo series has been a chance to commune in ways that they may not have before the virus. “In London, you can get so lost in the parties and work that you forget about the people outside the London bubble,” they said. The subject of one of their portraits, Kelly, is self-quarantining in Malaysia. Another, Joe, is in Wales. “I met Joe on a bus one night. We were both coming home from a night out, about three years ago, and he was sat with a friend of mine he was dating at the time,” Glazzard said. “I had sauce all over my face and was waving chicken wings in my hands.” They added, “We haven’t seen each other in ages.” During the shoot, Joe tried on about six different outfits, before settling on what he called his “Juergen Teller” look: shirtless, in boxer shorts, with a set of foam hair rollers decorating one side of his head. The image is both glamorous and haunting; it captures Joe’s isolation (his only companion is a monstera plant, in the corner of the sparsely decorated room) but also his hunger to be seen and appraised.
The pandemic has forced portrait photographers to innovate. Collier Schorr shot the musician and actress Janelle Monáe via Zoom for the latest cover of Vanity Fair. For a recent issue of The New Yorker, Matt Grubb shot the singer Phoebe Bridgers using his desktop computer, and left the monitor in the frame. So far, Glazzard said, a number of photography programs at British universities have taught Glazzard’s FaceTime portraits as an example of how students can continue to make work even in these constricted times. One can see why Glazzard’s portraits might be pedagogically useful, not only for their composition and character but for how they show, within their borders, all the tools used to make them: a computer with sixty-eight-per-cent battery remaining, a rectangular application window, two faces on either end of an Internet connection. Such things are now our tethers to the outside world; in capturing them, Glazzard has created a portrait of a generation trying to hold onto that which they cannot touch.
