Somerset House to celebrate beards with portrait exhibition
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Version 0 of 1. They were once the domain of the dignified elderly gent – but now as beards and ostentatious facial hair adorn every on-trend male face they are to be the subject of an art exhibition. A series of 80 portraits of people sporting impressive and interesting facial hair will go on display at Somerset House, central London, next year. The photographs were taken by award-winning photographer Brock Elbank, with a dozen of the works commissioned by Somerset House for the show exhibited for the first time. Subjects vary from actor John Hurt and model Ricki Hall to Harnaam Kaur, a woman with polycystic ovaries which have caused her to grow facial hair as a symptom, and an Italian called Angelo Gallamini who Brock described as owning “the Zeus of beards”. The exhibition began as a charity project when Elbank teamed up with friend Jimmy Niggles, who had begun a charity called Beard Season in Australia, raising awareness about skin cancer through persuading men to grow beards. Elbank contacted people from around the world with unique or flamboyant facial hair to be a part of the photography project, with many travelling thousands of miles over the past year to the UK to have their pictures taken and included in the original 60 charity portraits. After Somerset House agreed to exhibit the project, Elbank was commissioned to shoot a further dozen portraits of bearded figures that would be exclusive to the show, which opens in March. “I’ve been labelled a beard photographer but I’m not, I just like interesting subject matter for my portraits,” said Elbank. “It’s not the beard, it’s the person wearing the beard. I mean, we have shot people with beards down to their waist, which is obviously very impressive, but I hope that people will see beyond that in my photography. It’s just interesting people, a real cross-section of society that will be brought together in this show. We even went down to the British Beard and Moustache championships and we shot a guy called Edwin Ven who had terminal cancer. He was only 51 and he actually passed away six days after I took that portrait.” Elbank said that while the show was a celebration of beards, he insisted it was not simply jumping on the hipster facial hair bandwagon. “Beards are very in vogue at the moment but when I took the first photo that will be in this exhibition, of my friend Miles Better who is a tattooist in Soho, it was 2004 and beards weren’t fashionable,” he said. “I don’t really want to use the word hipster in relation to this exhibition because that’s not what it’s about – this all began because of a charity and to raise awareness of melanoma, it wasn’t about making a fashion statement. This is not just jumping on the fashion bandwagon, it is simply an angle, an interesting set of subjects for my photos.” Beard is from 5 March – 29 March in the Terrace Rooms at Somerset House |