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 has been 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.”