It’s 2004, and Amy Winehouse has just released her debut album, Frank. It’s earned her two Brit Award nominations, but she’s not yet the cultural icon she will become. She is twenty years old, sharp-tongued and sitting in a 1950s diner called FatBoy’s in East London, drinking a strawberry milkshake.
Across from her is Ram Shergill, a fashion photographer from Southeast London whose career was shaped by “a heady mix of being mentored McQueen, studying image making processes, and growing up inspired by fashion, hanging out at Hyper Hyper and Kensington Market”.
Having caught the attention of milliner Philip Treacy, stylist and editor Isabella Blow and designer Alexander McQueen, he developed a visual language equally influenced by British fashion and the glamour of Indian cinema.
In a few hours, Ram will tell Amy she is Elvis, and she will understand exactly what he means.
The photographs taken that day – Amy leaning on the diner counter, dark locks loose, hoop earrings peeking through and eyeliner not quite yet trademark thick – feel intimate, hinting at a story of Amy on the cusp of superstardom.
Over twenty years later, those images are on display in a format never seen before at FRAMELESS, the multi-award-winning immersive art experience. As part of Stories — Brought to Life, a limited-run residency created in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, they have been scaled to fill towering gallery walls, their stories complemented by animation, music and speech.
Amy Winehouse is one of five cultural icons featured in the residency, alongside Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela, William Shakespeare and Malala Yousafzai, whose portraits anchor the experience.
What makes a portrait?
“I think it’s the communication,” Shergill says. “Roland Barthes would call it the punctum, that pinprick you see when you view an image,”. Barthes used the term to describe the detail in the photograph that catches without warning. Rather than the composed information of the image, it’s the thing you didn’t go looking for, that reaches out and makes itself felt. “Furthering Barthes, I suggest ‘splinter semiotics of vision’,”
“‘Splinter Semiotics of Vision’ is my term for the details in an image that stick in our minds. They may not be the main subject of the picture, but they’re often the parts we remember. These visual splinters spark personal memories, emotions, and associations, giving images a life beyond their original meaning,”
“For example, if you look closely in the images of Amy at FRAMELESS in the diner you see much more around her, each object and item in the image collectively makes the narrative — you can make many stories come to life,”
For Shergill, this is not accidental. It’s the product of something that happens long before the camera lens is raised. “I would spend hours with her before the shoot. We would then talk about how we were going to do the shoot, and I would try to communicate how she felt on the day,” Ram says. “And that you can see in the pictures. There’s something more,”
The photograph, in his view, is the product of communication. Yet that day with Amy, the conversation nearly didn’t happen. She arrived at the studio uninterested in the clothes and unafraid to leave.
“I had to get on her level.”
Talking to her into the garden of his East London studio before the diner doors opened, the pair spoke for over an hour, and he ultimately handed her control of the styling. “She goes, really?” Ram recalls. “The story between us is in that particular moment. That story, that connection, that interconnection, I think that’s why those pictures mean quite a lot to me.”
The images that followed were, in his words, “the rawest Amy”.
The power of portraiture
There’s a paradox at the centre of portrait photography: the image is fixed, but its meaning is not. Of seeing the work at FRAMELESS, he says, “I was quite emotional to see the image that big because there’s so much you can see in them,”
The transparency of the original photograph, shot on medium format slide film, gains something at scale. Details that may pass unnoticed come into focus – the softness around Amy’s eyes, the specificity of her pose, the curve of her eyeliner, drawn like an Egyptian queen at his suggestion, which became her signature. The latter is a small moment of creative exchange that became one of the defining features of her public image, visible now in enormous scale.
That a portrait can keep revealing itself over time is not, Shergill suggests, a property of the image alone. It’s a property of its context and viewer, too. We bring ourselves into it. We bring what we didn’t know then.
That said, Shergill sensed her meteoric rise to fame. “I had a premonition on the day that something was going to happen to this girl,” he explains. “Whatever time I had with her, I had to capture it now.”
“She was like this ‘neo-nomadic’ kind of girl — the Girl with the Big Hoop Earring sitting at the diner, contemplating and singing at me, relaxed with her hand on her forehead,” Ram recalls. “I said, ‘Amy, you are Elvis.’”
“And then she just looked at me and said, ‘What you on about?’, and then after a pause she looked at me right in the eye said softly, ‘I get you.’”
“The way she sang – she sang on the shoot for me – I was like, what, I could not believe how talented she was. For me this was the beginnings of the making of an icon.”
Why human stories matter
Shergill began his career before digital photography became mainstream, before social media changed distribution, before artificial intelligence began producing portraits without any photographer at all.
On AI, he is measured but clear. “A lot of the AI images that you see, you don’t get to see the person. They’re very vacant and blank.” The missing detail, the punctum-creator, is the human encounter.
“When you see a photograph or a painting, you see that sitter sitting over a few hours of time, so the artist in collaboration with the sitter is capturing that,” he adds. “And that’s why I think our fascination is so strong. A person is capturing you, it feels like a symbiotic vision. There was a methodology behind the image.”
In his case, the methodology is the hour in the garden, the styling rethink, the milkshake, the Martha Reeves and the Vandellas record punctuated with the sounds of Amy’s voice.
Now, what was once read at imperfection reads as evidence. “Even a lot of my new photo shoots that I do, I don’t retouch them. I just keep them clean,” he explains. “I think we’re looking for that human interaction and the realness of a human. No filter. I think that that might be a future way of kind of taking the language of photography much further.”
The more artificial intelligence can produce images without human presence, the more human presence becomes the point – and not just in photography. Seeing art in person, especially in an immersive setting, creates space to connect with it more deeply.
“What I enjoyed about FRAMELESS, is that the works in the gallery are immersive, you can connect with art like never before, it’s like going on an ‘art rollercoaster’ or going to a fairground when you were a child. You can engage with art in a new and creative way, and most of all it is fun!”
Seeing great art differently
The goal of Stories – Brought to Life, created by FRAMELESS in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, was to use technology to deepen the experience of portraiture. The result is a journey through the lives of five figures, where archival imagery is reinterpreted through artist-led animation, music and speech creating a narrative that sits somewhere between exhibition and theatre.
Of the residency, Shergill says, “I absolutely loved it. To see Amy like that in that large format. It’s seeing the modernity of the kind of Girl with the Pearl Earring. A girl of today and forever, the Girl with the Hoop Earring.”
Shergill’s visit to the limited-time residency was followed by a journey into FRAMELESS’ four permanent galleries, of which he describes the childlike joy sharing the experience with friends. “It gives you a sense of play with the art.”
“For me, FRAMELESS has done it really well, educating and inspiring future generations, maybe one of the kids who goes to see the artworks and imagery at FRAMELESS might be inspired to become a great artist, iconic freedom fighter, Nobel Prize laureate, or one of the greatest singers of our time. ”
Stories — Brought to Life runs at FRAMELESS, 6 Marble Arch, London, W1H 7AP from 21 May and is included with standard FRAMELESS admission and FRAMELESS Lates admission. From 13 August, the residency is exclusively available at FRAMELESS Lates, every Friday and Saturday 6-10pm and 18+ only, until 12 September.
📍 Location: FRAMELESS, Marble Arch, London
📅 Dates: 21 May – 13 August. From 13 August – 12 September, only available during FRAMELESS Lates, every Friday & Saturday, 6–10pm.
🎟️ Tickets: Included in your FRAMELESS ticket