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I have chosen an image from the project 'The Rugged Places’. What draws me to this work, is the clear connection Atkinson has with her subject, and the sense of collaboration and shared voice she engenders to open out a narrative around the experience of growing up in a rural environment.

All sorts of people appear in photographic portraits. Often we are given clues to the identity of the subject. Backgrounds can indicate character traits, give clues to profession or status. Sometimes we can see that the photograph is conceptual and the person we see is representing something we need to think about through their gestures, portrayal or stance. Perhaps identity has been stripped of its specific individuality and somehow conceptualized, prescribed to direct our thoughts to what the photographer is visually ‘up to’.

Choose an image from the portfolio, they said. And so I trawled, imagining I might be a client, a commissioner, challenging the drop-down menus to find me a photographer I might write about.

That single thumbnail has to do so much. The viewer needs to be curious enough to click through to the portfolio and then, hopefully, onto a website or Flickr page.

What struck me immediately about Peter Mearns' image was the structural similarity to Velazquez’s Las Meninas, painted more than 400 years ago. We have an image divided into three distinct ‘bands’ or ‘grounds’ - foreground, middleground and background.