Vanessa Winship pt.2

I'm always ten seconds ahead of the curve. Today, the internet is full of this image which is a finalist for the National Portrait Gallery Taylor Wessing Portrait Award. It is Vanessa Winship's, who has been nominated along with three other photographers. The winner will be announced on November 3. I'm not much for anything like an art competition, especially since another in my list of wonderful photographers, Michal Chelbin, has been nominated. I will try to search for the criteria the judges will be using to evaluate these works, but I am finding it difficult to believe that one can actually measure such things. Aesthetics has been so trodden upon by critics in the past twenty years that it is almost embarrassing to privilege one thing over another, but the world still muddles about trying to find its way out of the Postmodern Era. It seems violence of any sort has been the overwhelming response.

But I wander in such an old-fashioned way. In truth, I am simply eaten up by envy. Not for the nominations, of course, but for the work. Have you looked at those Winship portraits yet? They have me subscribing to most of the seven deadly sins. Not necessarily Gluttony, but most of the others. While I am serving the public on a daily basis, she is out making these fabulous images. Guts and talent. Not of the same magnitude as Copernicus, of course, but similar. I feel I have wasted my life earning a living, making ends meet. I should have thrown caution to the wind, as they used to say. I should have followed my passion.

What though, I wonder, should I tell some young person who thought to do the same thing who came looking for advice? What would be my counsel?