I’m getting fed up with blogging and tweeting about how the fotoLibra site crashed last week and is nearly back up and running now, so I’ll take a quick break to laud a stunning photograph I saw in the paper on Saturday.

I wish I could show it to you here, but because of sensible copyright reasons I can only offer you a link to it: bit.ly/Hct01C

I urge, urge, urge you please to click on the link and look.

It is a portrait of a poor family in Accrington, Lancashire, and in composition, colour, lighting and the clear frank gaze of the sitters (what else can I call them?) it is a portrait worthy of a fine artist, a Dutch master, a Vermeer even. These are not handsome or pretty people. But MacPherson makes them beautiful.

Although I work as a picture librarian, I’m not a photographer and I don’t move in photographic circles, so I don’t know if Colin MacPherson is famous or not. I know from this one photograph that he deserves to be. I must have stared at this image for ten minutes on Saturday morning. It is luminous, and numinous. And somehow, it is much more compelling seen on cheap newsprint than on your top-of-the-range 28″ monitor.

And you know what the photograph really says to me? Look at those little girls. Look at their parents.

In the midst of despair there is always hope.

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