A photograph of police arresting a drunken man outside a Swansea takeaway on “Black Eye Friday” has gone viral, with some comparing it to “a boozy Renaissance painting” and others seeing the influence of French Romanticism.
One admirer of the shot, by Dimitris Legakis, thought it merited a spot alongside the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo: “Wind Street. Swansea. Put it in the Louvre.”
The picture was taken at about 12.30am on the last Friday before Christmas, an evening so notorious for alcohol-fuelled carousing that it has come to be known on our drink-soaked island as Mad Friday or Black Eye Friday.
It shows three police officers in hi-vis jackets sitting on top of a man outside a Swansea takeaway – one talking into his radio as the other two try to handcuff their suspect.
In front of them, lying casually on the floor with a cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other, is a young man taking a pouting selfie. Behind is a young blonde girl with her tongue out, giving the v-sign. Next to her, breaking through the fourth wall by looking straight at Legakis’s lens, is the only sober-looking figure not in uniform, who clutches one of the police officers’ helmets.
A second photograph in the series – which showed the selfie taker on his feet, apparently remonstrating with the police, as others grinned around him – was compared by culture vultures to the 1817 painting The Raft of Medusa by French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault.
Both pictures recalled the now famous image taken by Joel Goodman in Manchester on New Year’s Day in 2015, which showed a man lying in the street reaching for his beer, like Adam stretching an arm out to God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting, as chaos unfolded around him.
Legakis said he was flattered to be compared with both Goodman and one of the finest French artists of the early 19th century. “To make a painting takes a lot of effort and skill. What I have done is something you cannot replicate. They are both unique in their own way. If what I have captured resembles a Renaissance or Romantic painting, I am extremely flattered,” he said, describing Goodman as “a legend”.
The secret to taking such candid street photography is to “push your luck a lot”, said Legakis. “You have to really try hard, to be aware of what might happen, to be in the right place at the right time.”
In this instance, Legakis had hit the streets of Swansea shortly after 10pm, as he often does on big drinking events in the Welsh calendar, such as “Beaujolais Day”, a Swansea oddity which marks the first harvest of grapes in the wine-making region of France each November.
He noticed police speaking to the drunk man earlier in the evening, and spotted him later going into a takeaway when officers went to arrest him. “He resisted arrest and they struggled to handcuff him. At one point there were seven officers on top of him,” said Legakis.
As he photographed the drama, other revellers started “mucking about” trying to get in shot. “They thought it was hilarious,” said Legakis. So far only one of those photographed has been in touch asking for a copy: “The guy holding the helmet. The most normal looking person in the whole photo.”
Born in Greece, Legakis has lived in Wales for 23 years and is still baffled by the British attitude towards alcohol. “I still do not understand it at all. You get people on a Monday saying ‘I can’t wait to get drunk on Friday’. This would never happen in Greece.”
