I went to Alastair Thain’s exhibition recently who has been producing
extraordinary portraits. He built a series of cameras himself, based on those
used by NASA to photograph Earth from the space shuttle. The result is the most
advanced high-resolution land-based camera system in existence, which uses
negatives measuring nine by 18 inches, and creates prints up to four metres in
height.
I was amazed by the quality and
clarity of the photographs but what really caught my attention was those in the
pictures. There was portraits of fairly ordinary people doing extraordinary
things with their lives, (I thought you would like that – You know who you
are!) such as Fabien Cousteau. He was the only man who has ever viewed the
ocean through the eyes of a great white shark, or Dr Mae Jemison who has lived
a life of extraordinary achievements. For most people, being a qualified
engineer and medical physician, who speaks Swahili, Russian and Japanese and
has worked for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leona, would be quite enough for one
lifetime. But she was also determined to fulfil a childhood dream to travel
into space. Hmm…in 1992 she became the first African-American woman to do just
that.
Ps. Good luck with the pitch “Superman”!
