Riaan,
I find this a most captivating portrait — the facial expression poses so many questions and all the while there is an air of mischief. I love it and it harks back to a time of more realistic portraiture as opposed to the sanitised, homogenised predictable glossed up plastic of so much of today's offerings.
I beg to differ with some of the other comments. I have no issue at all with the gritty grainy starkness of the image. In the recent past there was such diversity of presentation in portaiture .... particularly editorial portraiture .... which is sadly missing in this era of the soporific perfection of digital capture. Nigel Parry's work in England before he went west across the Atlantic springs to mind. And a lot of David Bailey.
The pic has pleased me and rekindled my faith in vision.
W
