Easter Monday was damp and rainy.

Too rainy to get anything done in the garden so we went to the National Portrait Galley to look at this years Photographic Portraiture prize winners.

And I didn’t like any of them.

All super sharp portraits, even those shot on film, and soulless. Technically excellent but lacking soul. It could have been a display of work by wedding photographers.

Personally, I think that it is in part due to the fact that digital makes it absurdly easy to take multiple, nay hundreds of the same shot and then pick the best, and that makes for soulless technical excellence. It’s also why these days I’m more interested in lomography as an art form, using old or simple cameras to shoot on what is often expired film and to see what happens, without worrying about the image quality or if the timing’s quite right to see if something interesting comes out …