The tear

A portrait photographer spends his working life reading faces that have been trained not to be read. Politicians are the hardest sitters of all. They arrive with a surface that has been built over decades and maintained daily, and the first ten minutes of any sitting are spent watching that surface hold. It is only when something interrupts the routine that anything else appears.

Former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair Rory Lewis Photographer 2019

I photographed Tony Blair at his offices in London in the spring of 2019. He was the third Prime Minister I had sat, and the session ran to twenty minutes, which is standard at that level and is the whole of the time you get. I had spent the preceding week on the usual preparation: the other photographers who had made his portrait, the book, and a long stretch of old Parliamentary debates. That research is ordinarily a means of finding something to talk about in the first two minutes. In this case it did something else. If you watch enough of those debates in a week, you are not watching a personality. You are watching a decade of legislation being argued through, and you arrive at the sitting with that in your head rather than the hobbies.

Most of what we made that day is what you would expect and what the occasion called for: a statesman, considered, looking back and looking directly to camera. He was an extraordinary sitter, generous with the time, entirely at ease. I do not want to pretend otherwise, and the fact that he was good in the chair is not a small thing to a photographer working against a clock.

That was the picture in 2019, and for seven years it was the only picture. What has changed since is not the file. It is me.

Earlier this year I went back to it and tore it. The paper across the lower half of the face is not something Mr Blair held at his offices in London. He sat for a statesman's portrait and I gave him one. The tear is mine, made now, applied to a frame made then, and I want that stated plainly at the top rather than discovered afterwards. This is a constructed image and it should be read as one.

It divides the picture at the mouth. The eyes remain, and they remain looking directly at the lens. Everything below the tear is present but interrupted. It is not a subtle idea, and I do not think portraits of politicians benefit from subtlety.

What interests me is the seven years. A portrait is supposed to settle a person. You make it, you deliver it, it goes into the record and it stops moving. This one did not stop moving. The assessment of the sitter kept changing around the picture until the picture no longer matched it, and at some point the honest response was to intervene in my own work rather than to leave it standing as a thing I no longer believed. Photographers are not usually permitted to do that. We are supposed to be witnesses and then go quiet. I have decided in this case not to go quiet.

I am a photographer, not a lawyer. But I have spent twenty years photographing soldiers, judges, officers and public servants, and one thing that comes through repeatedly in those sittings is how much of British institutional life rests on arrangements that were never written down as a single document. The common law is the clearest example. It accumulated. It was not designed, it was deposited, layer on layer, and the protections it produced were the residue of a very long argument about what the state may do to a person.

A great deal of that residue was cleared away between 1998 and 2007.

The rule against double jeopardy — that a man acquitted may not be tried again for the same offence — was abolished for serious cases by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and abolished retrospectively. The same Act permitted trial without a jury where tampering was feared, and there were repeated attempts to remove juries from complex fraud trials. The exclusionary rules on hearsay and on previous convictions, which existed to stop a jury reasoning from character rather than evidence, were substantially loosened. Anti-social behaviour orders imposed restrictions on the civil standard of proof and sent people to prison for breaching them. Control orders did something structurally similar in the terrorism context. The government pushed for ninety days of detention without charge against a habeas corpus tradition running back past 1679, and settled for twenty-eight.

Each of these was argued for on its own terms, and several of the arguments were serious. Parliament is sovereign and entitled to legislate. That is the honest counter-case and I will not pretend it does not exist. The Human Rights Act, which arrived in the same period, is defended across most of the legal profession, and the Good Friday Agreement ended a thirty-year conflict.

But taken together, the direction was consistent. Protections that had taken centuries to accumulate were removed inside a decade, on the reasoning that the system needed rebalancing. What replaced them was newer, tidier, and considerably more convenient for the executive. We are still arguing about the result, and the arguments we are having now about the courts, about detention, about the boundary between civil and criminal power, are arguments about foundations laid then.

That is what the torn sheet is about. Not that the man in the frame destroyed the law. He did not, and the claim would be easy to dismiss. It is that a great deal was taken out, deliberately and by hand, inside a single decade.

The picture does not prove any of this, and I would not want it to. It is a portrait I made in 2019 and interfered with in 2026, and the interference is the argument. The eyes above the tear are exactly as he gave them to me. Everything else is my doing, and I will answer for it.

One of my aims as a portraitist is to record the figures of our time. Recording them properly means saying what they did.