Photo – Manchester Drunks On New Year’s Eve – Seen as Renaissance Art

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This 2016 photo has gone surprisingly viral. Professional photographer Joel Goodman spent his New Year’s Eve / Day photographing drunks staggering around in and outside bars. It’s not like he was trying to photograph The Loch Ness Monster – he could have seen plenty of drunks in any town or city centre in the Western World. He chose Manchester. One image he captured has been acclaimed as comparable to Renaissance art, and though action packed with police tending to one drunkard while another lies in the middle of the street still holding his beer, it has lots of poor compositional aspects. The police all face away from camera, traffic posts and lamp-posts block the way. One passer by grins at the camera in a hello Mum fashion. The photo is not likely to be just praised for its aesthetic merits (it has already been transformed into a computer art poster print painting), it is going to fuel the anti-binge drinking Prohibition by degrees lobby who will wave it as a typical street scene. To me its impact is more akin to Hogarth’s Gin Lane studies of London in 1751 than any Renaissance work. The photographer happened to be in a good spot to capture an image he was already actively consciously pursuing – people getting drunk on a special annual occasion. Who would have thunk it? Arthur Chappell