The presidential portrait in the Instagram age is a thing of beauty — it takes you up, close and personal, to the powerful (mostly) male, creating an optics of intimacy for us to consume.
If you were Barack H Obama, those images would have beamed out an aesthetic of black power, assertion and intelligence. If you are Vladimir Putin, entering a leopard’s cage or showing off those rippled muscles is more your thing. So, when Justin Trudeau — he, whose blue, earnest eyes the camera adores and is adored back — arrived at India’s most-photographed monument, stunning visuals were guaranteed.
The Taj Mahal portrait is just one of those things that foreign dignitaries tick off their itinerary, before getting on to more serious business. In most cases, it is the Taj’s beauty which towers over its visitors, making it a largely stiff, formal affair.
Princess Diana, alone on the love seat, was, perhaps, the only one who came close to upstaging the monument to love — so fragile a picture she made of a woman unloved. The Trudeaus, though, are in a league of their own. The Canadian Prime Minister and his family — wife, two sons and a daughter — make for a picture of sunny, homely wholesomeness against the Taj. But it’s not the portrait on the love seat that stands out.
It’s the one of Trudeau, back to the camera, roughhousing the littlest one as the family breaks into peals of laughter around him. Who would have thought this was a president on an official visit — and not a doting family man on a picnic? If there were an unsaid diplomatic protocol about having too much fun while at work, it sure was busted by the Trudeau family.
Across the world, as politics flounders on uncertainty and rage, images that humanise the powerful help quell the panic, reassure us that a decent soul is at the wheel. Perhaps, that is also one of the many ways people are played. Nevertheless, the shining, beautiful images from Agra do call for a suspension of disbelief, and that old tribute: Wah Trudeau!
