His portrait may be on the back wall of the gallery, but the heat of blues legend John Lee Hooker’s stare in Alex Harsley’s portrait of John Lee Hooker (1980) is enough to make a viewer think they did something to piss him off. Everything about the composition makes Hooker seem poised for a fight: the downward angle of both his gaze and hat, how he sits at a slight diagonal, his fist raised over his guitar. That fist’s intensity may be slightly dulled by motion blur, but I still hoped the photographer wasn’t on the receiving end of it.

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