Manchester Fine Art: New Year’s Eve

Manchester made headlines at the start of the year after a photo of a part of the city centre went viral after being likened to fine art as a Renaissance masterpiece. The image was taken by freelance photographer Joel Goodman and first appeared in a picture gallery on the Manchester Evening News website. BBC producer Roland Hughes took to Twitter to share the image to the nation.

The photograph shows police wrestling with a man in the foreground while a woman in a red dress and fur coat gestures at the scene and another man lies across the road reaching for his pint with a rather prominent gut spilling over his jeans. Many other spectators watch the action unfolding in the background outside of a Gregg’s.

Thousands of retweets later, the photograph was literally turned in to art by the use of digital effects with some users displaying the scene as a watercolor or a surrealist work. One user even proved the golden ratio can be applied.

The man reaching for his pint however proved the star of the masterpiece, with Photoshop masters inserting him into Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’ and Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asieneres’. While Goodman says he was simple “in the right place at the right time” to capture the image, there is no doubt that there is something incredibly captivating about it.

While there will be hundred of photographs displaying posing, happy partygoers from the same night, there’s no doubt that candid photographs of drunk and angry people might be more compelling as a demonstration of humanity. Either way, this single image has captured a nation’s interest in the meaning and versatility of fine art.

Image credits: © Joel Goodman

Posted in categories: Contemporary Art, Fine Art