Finn in a field  is shortlisted for the  2025 Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize  -  National Portrait Gallery, London  

Finn in a field

Finn had been helping his father herd cattle on a farm in Balgowan in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal
Province. Coming across a Eucalyptus tree toppled in a storm, he clambered onto a branch, lay down
and closed his eyes. The portrait is part of an ongoing series, The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Child, a body of work that examines the years leading up to adolescence. The image makes me think of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, in which the subject considers lying down in woods that are “lovely, dark and deep” but thinks better of it: “I have miles to go before I sleep”. Mainstream interpretation of this poem suggests a yearning to ‘opt out ’ of the unrelenting grind of existence,but Finn, in this image, is opting in, connecting with nature from which he has yet to be severed. Reflecting on this portrait, I hear the words of the novelist Martin Amis: “But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.”