Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' - A Guest Post by Sally Guaragna

Stephen Alexander:  

I Want to Hold Your Hand (2024)

 

Stephen Alexander's disturbing self-portrait accompanied by Myra Hindley is a stark reminder of the fact that evil lurks around every corner and that the radiant innocence of childhood offers no protection; as the parents of the young girls murdered in Stockport last month discovered to their horror [1].

 

It also reminds us of the fact that the Swinging Sixties began not only "Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban / And the release of the Beatles' first LP" [2], but with the Moors murders - just as it ended in an equally brutal and depraved manner with the Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by the Manson Family in the summer of 1969. 

 

The fact that the photo of the artist as a child is for the most part entirely genuine - taken in 1966 at Southend-on-Sea - only adds to its power. The only change made (non-digitally) is the replacement of the head of Alexander's sister with that of a woman dubbed by the press as the most hated woman in Britain. 

 

Alexander explains: 

 

'I cut out the famous police photograph of Hindley taken shortly after her arrest in 1965 and pasted it by hand directly on to the photo of my sister. I wanted it to look like a mask being worn. A mask more terrible even than the one worn by Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), because it depicted the face of a rather glamorous young woman who, with her peroxide blonde bouffant, reminded me of a much-loved aunty in the 1960s whose hand I would happily hold.'    

 

Alexander's is a great image; one that, in my view, deserves to be hung alongside Marcus Harvey's controversial 1995 painting made using casts of an infant's tiny hand to create a giant mosaic of Hindley:   

 

 

Marcus Harvey: Myra (1995) [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] On 29 July 2024, a mass stabbing occurred at a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside. Three children were killed, and ten other people - eight of whom were children - were injured, some of them critically. A 17-year-old male was arrested at the scene and charged with murder, attempted murder, and possession of a bladed weapon.

 

[2] Philip Larkin, 'Annus Mirabilis', first published in The London Magazine, Vol. 9, No.10, (January 1970): click here. 

 

[3] Marcus Harvey's 1995 painting Myra caused a lot of fuss when it was displayed at the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy of Art in London from 8 September to 28 December 1997: four members of the RA resigned in protest at its inclusion; windows at Burlington House, where the Academy is based, were smashed; the painting was vandalised twice (by fellow artists); and a children's charity accused the RA of the 'sick exploitation of dead children'. Even Hindley wrote from prison to ask for her portrait to be removed from the exhibition.

 

 

To read another post by Sally Guaragna - reflections on my 'When the Moon Hits Your Eye' photo (5 May 2023) - please click here.