#hellebrand

Photographs from Londoners at Home by Nancy Hellebrand in The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst.

[Johnny Sparsholt, an aspiring portrait painter and dyslexic has gone to visit an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. He expected “resilient cockneys, eccentrics posed with their lapdogs and Afghan hounds, aristos in evening dress” but found photographs of “a different London, so real it was hard to recognize”.]

A picture, unlike the dim labyrinth of a book, could be seen at once, but to bring it all to the front of the mind’s eye and hold it there was impossible. Some quite simple image might house an irreducible mystery: this he seemed always to have known. There was a photograph here with an atmosphere that excited and eluded him. In a room lit from the right, two lean young men sat on the end of a large double bed with a dark candlewick covering. There were psychedelic posters behind them and a blown-up photo of Mick Jagger dancing and pointing on the nearer side wall. Close up in the foreground, items on a tabletop loomed large, two glass ashtrays, a gleaming packet of Benson & Hedges, a painted bowl in which objects had been heaped, surmounted by a square white adaptor plug, strangely prominent. They didn’t have much, these two men, but they were tidy, and the adaptor was nothing to be ashamed of. Was it also the photographer’s way of saying something that the men themselves couldn’t make explicit? He got closer and closer to the glazed threshold of the photo, the world behind him receding. He seemed to stare into the room through a two-way mirror - from which, at that moment, both men looked away, as though on the brink of some hesitant exposure. Both sat forward, elbows on thighs, smoking. Both were sexy in the wild new way, the one on the left in a tight patterned sweatshirt, dark hair swept back to the collar, long sideburns, rings on two fingers; the other man, head sideways as if cradling a phone in his shoulder-length hair, was shirtless, with tattooed arms, brushing the tip of his roll-up against the rim of the fluted glass.