Annie Lennox kindly donated 2 prints from her photography sessions with Alan Martin to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2011. The 2 prints were taken from the photography sessions that Annie colaborated with Allan Martin on, which subsequently became the album cover for Bare.
These are now on display in Edinburgh at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in an exhibition entitled “Collecting Now” which features over 50 donated works to the gallery. The exhibition is open now until 20th September 2015.
Here is what the gallery write about the 2 prints:
“This is a powerful portrait of the world-famous singer-songwriter and campaigner, Annie Lennox. She presents herself in a statuesque pose, covered with chalk or clay, the band of tartan around her neck references her Scottish heritage. It links to another portrait of Lennox in the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection, which was used as the cover for her 2003 album, ‘Bare’. Lennox wrote that: “The Bare album contains songs that are deeply personal and emotional. In a sense I have ‘exposed’ myself through the work, to reveal aspects of an inner world which are fragile… broken though experience, but not entirely smashed.”
“This is a beautiful and captivating image of Annie Lennox who shot to global fame in the 1980s as half of the pop-duo Eurythmics. In the 1990s she embarked on an equally successful solo-career. This photograph was used as the album cover of her third solo studio album, ‘Bare’, which was released in 2003. Lennox has said: “The ‘posture’ of the image refers back to earlier days of Eurythmics with the ‘Touch’ cover, only this time I have now turned to face the audience eye to eye, as it were. I am as ‘bare’ as the title suggests, though not entirely exposed. The image is timeless, gender free, and racially ambiguous. I could be a statue, a ghostly apparition, or an Indian saddhu. The false lashes represent the artifice of ‘performance'”.
