As per usual, I’m in the middle of stuff, unfinished, half-started, mid-mix.
So I thought I’d keep my finger on the pulse of modern society and comment on the one thing that’s dominating our lives right now.
But what a huge subject. It’s hard to know what to say.
So I think I’ll talk about the Queen’s image.
The face that you can find everywhere, the face we exchange for goods and services. That face is so iconic, so visually recognisable. And yet she just looked… normal. Like the perfect visual example of a common or garden grandmother. Indeed, that face could be anyone’s mother or grandmother, she would fit right in to normal society if she wasn’t surrounded by dignitaries and security.
I saw a picture on Instagram of a homeless man sleeping next to a bus stop billboard with the Queen’s obituary notice on it and I understood what the image was getting at but the Queen wasn’t born into poverty and the homeless man wasn’t born into royalty and however unfair it might be, we are where we are in society and the Queen inherited a role that she lived up to for her whole life. It had privileges that many of us will never see, but she was still another human being as King Charles is. He’s currently a man who has lost his mother and I really feel for him as he is spending a massive amount of this week fulfilling his duties whilst very probably holding back a massive sea of emotion. Man, if it was me, I’d be blubbing like a baby!
But Charles is not an icon like the Queen. And in image, she was never just another human being. He is never going to fill her shoes when it comes to her place in our collective cultural consciousness. Her image, her face, has a power to it that is truly potent. If you put her face next to a homeless man, if an artist takes her face and embellishes it in technicolour, if a punk band defaces a photo of her, it’s immediately powerful because it’s her.
The two short films that she appeared in are the most surprising, and for me, greatest times her image was used. Her afternoon tea with Paddington caught something in her expressions that seemed playful and sweet and unusually warm but even better was the reveal for the Olympics when Daniel Craig’s Bond is waiting patiently for her. When she turns round and it is actually her, it’s a really astonishing moment. The image that had long been given to us was of a lady who was fairly serious and all of a sudden she’s acting with 007.
I think us, her subjects, the people, can only guess who she was based on the images that were put before us. Perhaps we projected things for good or bad.
What I saw was a woman who seemed canny. She knew exactly who she was and exactly what her position was. She knew if she walked into a room everyone would stand up. That is real flipping power and she knew it! She was one of the most photographed people in history, a woman whose influence could make a real difference to things (hence the refusal to ever suggest a favourite football team) and I think her image was carefully cultivated to say little but convey more.
I think I’ve realised I will actually miss seeing her, so I guess her image had an effect on me too.