You’re just a face in the crowd until the man takes your photograph for posterity. David Charters reports on an electronic gallery
WE SEE millions of them in our lives, but know very few. Yet, we all have one. Some are pale, others dark.
Yes, these are the dials from which we can express our instant or more considered feelings – the cool half-smile, the pursed lips, the witless grin; a quizzical twitch of the nose, a puckering of the chin, a furrowing of the brow, the cocked eyebrow, frowns, grimaces, wide-eyed fear, wide-mouthed mirth.
It’s all there on the human face, but most faces are lost in the streams disgorging from the underground stations or flowing down the street. "Wasn’t that old so and so?" you say, but by the time you turn round she’s gone. Another face lost in the hustle-bustle.
The chap standing with a Nikon camera on Old Hall Street, Liverpool, has a face you wouldn’t forget easily with his twinkling glasses and eyes as blue as James Bond’s. This is Alastair Webster and he has just given the faces of 100 strangers a kind of immortality.
Well, they were strangers until he stopped them, in their daily routines, to ask if they would pause for a few moments, so that he could photograph them and listen to their stories. After all, everyone has a story to tell.
Now those stories and faces can be seen on his online gallery. He is also a member of the Daily Post Flickr group, set up to capture images of Liverpool throughout this year and into the future. But it is through these faces that barristers’ clerk Alastair, 36, has been able to tell the world what he loves about his native Merseyside – its people.
Not so long ago, an exhibition of this sort would have been shown for a few weeks at a local art gallery, viewed by a few dozen culture vultures, speaking in hushed tones. Now it has an almost limitless audience on the computer screen. One hundred faces’ photographers have sprung up all over a world turned into the global village by modern technology.
But there’s Alastair walking up from his chambers in India Buildings, his black shoes shone to shame any sergeant-major.
"I have deliberately set out not to aim for gender or age group," he says. "I tried to get a complete mix for the 100 strangers. So, basically, when I was in the street, someone didn’t have to catch my eye twice. They didn’t have to be good-looking or fancily dressed or striking in any way.
"I always try and concentrate on people’s eyes. They eyes say everything – happiness, curiosity, sadness. Also, I think that bits of me came out, projected into the people’s eyes."
People running for the bus or eating a sandwich as they hailed a taxi were exempted. But only about 50 others declined the opportunity to be "hung" in the gallery. If you apply the logic of opinion-polling, 100 people chosen at random should provide a reasonably representative glimpse of local life.
Although he has taken photographs with various cameras, particularly on his hill-walking expeditions, Alastair from Ainsdale used a Nikon FM2 with black and white film for most of the gallery shots. "There is something timeless about black and white film," he says. "It is quite grainy with a rough street feel. They could be looked at in 50 years. They are like a social document. I always use natural light and a manual camera, nothing automatic, so I have complete control over the image. I want to thank the people for allowing a little of their souls to be captured forever."
And so he strolls back to the chambers, one face among the many, each with a story to tell.
* Click here to see Alistair’s Flickr photo essay of 100 portraits now
Some of Alistair’s faces with his notes on their stories >>>
