The faces that gaze out at one from Suzanne Opton's photographs are strangely compelling, but it is difficult to put in words why they have the effect they undoubtedly do, at least on this observer. My inability to articulate a response may be partly because, in so far as I have a strong aesthetic sense, it is focused on literature and music rather than the visual arts, and so it is fortunate for me that these remarkable photographs immediately brought to mind the poem quoted above – and this alternative reference point is not simply literary but also musical; Housman's cycle, once amongst the most popular of poems, is now best known through settings by early 20th century English composers, most particularly the doomed George Butterworth, killed by a sniper on the Somme in August 1916.Footnote ¹ The contrast between the way Housman and Opton express what are, on the face of it, similar thoughts is, to my mind, fascinating.

Housman provides some, but by no means all, of the context necessary to read the poem. It is clear that the person who makes fleeting contact with the narrator is a soldier, a redcoat, indeed the observer is drawn to the scene in the first place by the soldiers' tread – but what may not be clear to a twenty-first century reader is that there is something slightly threatening about the scene Housman is describing. Britain's army in the 19th century was small and professional, with the ordinary soldiery drawn from the ill-educated, not to say brutish, rural poor. It was mostly based abroad in the Empire, and the relatively small numbers of soldiers based at home were largely on ceremonial duties or used for riot-control. Soldiers marching through the streets of industrial or mining towns were not infrequently stoned by the crowd; in Housman's small market towns the situation would have been somewhat less fraught, but soldiers in the street were rarely welcome. The Shropshire lad who is both the object and subject of these poems has a fascination with premature death, his own and that of his friends and lovers. Possibly, as a result, the military feature far more prominently in the cycle than might have been expected in what was still an overwhelmingly civilian society – still there is no natural affinity to be expected between the narrator (much less his classicist creator) and the redcoat who happens to turn his head at the right moment. This is a fleeting encounter with no chance of any meeting of minds, which gives a particular purity to the benevolence expressed in the final line of the poem. Eye contact alone produces this sentiment, but a simple expression of well-wishing without this very brief encounter would have a different, and lesser force. I can imagine the local squire or magnate toasting the troops as the upholders of the natural order of things, and although the sentiment would be quite genuine, it would have none of the emotional force of the simple statement, ‘Soldier [not soldiers, for this is an individual], I wish you well’.

Suzanne Opton, unlike Housman, interprets her pictures – but then she has to, because the pictures on their own defy interpretation. I can see the head of a young person resting on a textured surface that might be a carpet, and I am told that this is the head of a soldier – the exhibition is, after all, called ‘Soldiers’ – but this is something I have to take on trust; for all I know they might be models; after all, a buzz cut does not a soldier make. Their names are provided, it is said that they have recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan and that their faces ‘[hint] at the transformative experiences of war’; more, the blogger David Mixner tells us that ‘you can see the war etched into their faces’.Footnote ² Interestingly, the National Public Radio report on Opton's exhibition adds that ‘in some of the portraits, nothing would indicate that they have served in the military, leaving the context to be read from their faces’.Footnote ³ This is interesting because it is patently false – there is no way you could read any kind of context from these faces, any more than you can see war etched on them, whatever that means. Changing the subject for a moment, these photographs pose some of the same problems as ‘programme’ music, music that is designed to evoke an extra-musical idea. Thus, for example, there is nothing in the music of Elgar's Falstaff (Op. 68) that could not just as easily be a portrait of my grandmother or the Director of the LSE, or for that matter not be a portrait at all. The point being that if we take seriously the programme suggested by the composer (and there is no reason why we should) we do so simply because we recognise his authority as auteur, not because of anything in the work of art itself that gives us any kind of context. Being suggestible by nature, we hear music we are told is cheerful as cheerful, but if we had been told differently we would hear it differently.

This is very much to the point when we look at Opton's photographs. What we (or at least I) actually see is a set of human faces. Although I suspect that, according to her aesthetic, I ought not to allow her the privileges of an auteur, I'll take Opton's word for it that they are soldiers who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and not artists' models whose expressions convey the boredom associated with their trade rather than the thousand-yard stare of the combat veteran. It really does not matter. These are people we have not met before and ‘we are like to meet no more’; we do not know what is in their hearts and they do not know what is in ours – but, for some reason that it is still difficult to put into words, we can, and I do, wish them well.