I feel this is Us, going forward.
Press Association photographer Jacob King was in the right place at the right time with the right skills and detemination to grab this image of a protester getting carried away for throwing eggs at King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort.
They were all at Micklegate Bar, the City of York's historic gate, famously festooned with Noble heads during the War of the Roses, traditionally the only portal into the City allowed to the Crown.
This picture has everything:
It’s got Us: looking right at us in some sort of post post-ironic irony, looking perhaps a bit like Jesus, looking perhaps a bit as we tend to remember our earlier selves: clear eyes clear vision clear purpose and resolute, unafraid of the consequences of our actions.
It has the State: brightly vested with sharp tools of statecraft, holds us in control, subjugated.
Again, the State: but occulted, in street clothes and country cap, connected by wire to a wireless command.
And off to the side, barely seen, go the rest of Us: just strolling on by.
He threw eggs at the king: a medieval act in a medieval setting, aimed at an ancient expression of the State.
Throwing eggs at the King? At the Crown?? How charmingly quaint, a vaguely threatening performance of protest. They never did that to his mother, when she wore the Crown.
Because she was a woman? Well, maybe, but that feels more like a tale of chivalry, a quaint aspirational story in the face of the reality endured by Woman’s part of Us.
Because she served as a symbol? Not the symbol of the Crown obviously, because eggs were just thrown at the head destined to wear that Crown this coming spring.
It might be that Elizabeth was more than a symbol of benign State. Perhaps she serves also as a symbol of a past state of Us.
Born into revolutions of thought and technology, deeply traumatized by the two parts of a World War that consumed two generations of Us, her very face is a symbol of sobriety and solemnity, disciplined in the continence of consistency in appearance and action.
She and her peers rode a golden wave of prosperity and possibility. That wave has crested and is crashing, surf time is over.
We lie gasping, coughing, sprawled on wet sand that’s washing away with that golden wave, back into history.
That sobriety? Sober? Us, now? Suddenly we’re not acting all that soberly. Continence? Well, it’s pretty messy out there.
So Jacob King’s photograph leaves Us, looking right unto us. I think it remarkable that the gaze contains no fright, it's not scared. He’s young, he’ll learn.
But of course, all that’s just silly.
Patrick Thelwell is a seasoned protester, part of the crew that shut down London's Tower Bridge this summer, experienced in the theatre of dissent.
In reality, not only has the Crown previously been under fire from egg throwers (“I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast,” Elizabeth said at the time), but also an actual gunman, near enough to be taken personally, firing blanks. Her Majesty’s steel-eyed stare at her assailant as she gentles her beloved horse Burmese was duly recorded and often replayed, a lone horsewoman riding sidesaddle down the Mall through a crowd of millions, the vunerable Crown revealed.
But the symbol of Thelwell's captured gaze remains apart from the subsequent images of his more performative face.
It's a gaze unconcerned with the passing of Elizabeth and her cohort, but certain the abundance of their lifespans has trickled from our grasp. The generational trauma of their world in flames has been set aside and we no longer know War, nor how to be afraid of it.
It’s the gaze we see out of Moscow and Washington and Beijing, watching the centre it cannot hold.
And like Us, it’s a gaze watching for whatever's out there slouching around, and waiting for it to be born.
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These photographs are the property of the UK’s Press Association, PA Media Group Limited. They were taken by staff photographer Jacob King, and used here as Fair Comment in an opinion piece.
– by Staff
David Galway
