When I first saw this image in the London Art Fair 2011, I, to be honest, didn't realise it was Margaret Thatcher. I thought it could be the photographer's grandmother or something like that.
I came home, found the image online, saved it on my laptop to put it on my blog later on. Only realised today, when I did some research about it to make sure I don't give false information in my post.
Even though I didn't know practically anything about this image when I first saw it, I still liked it a lot because -apart from it looking aesthetically beautiful- it looks like it's loaded with meaning.
Apparently, this image is a part of Lisa Barnard's ongoing documentation of the former Conservative Central Office.
"
Like an archaeologist excavating the remains of Thatcherism, Barnard has examined the building – unoccupied since the Tories left in 2004 – twice each month since August 2009. Some of her images picture the building’s strange, decrepit corporate blue spaces, stained carpets and cracked plasterboard; others its surreal wasteland of diplomatic gifts, dishevelled election posters, rosettes and un-blown-up balloons. But it is the portraits of Thatcher, unearthed in an old cupboard, which bring together these works and define the project. Re-photographing the official images, and cropping out the various international dignitaries with whom Thatcher had originally posed, Barnard exposes the photographs’ corrupted state -– an ode to the impermanence and instability of colour photosensitive materials. Like Thatcher’s vision of politics, the portraits’ aged and slightly bleached surfaces are diluted and distorted in their present form. Deteriorating at different rates, the yellow, magenta and cyan dyes have reacted to time, humidity and damp, resembling the psychedelic chemical colour swirls of oil slicks. "
