One of the most striking things about Toby Glanville’s portraits of people – apart, that is, from their unstartled stillness – is that his subjects are revealed but never exposed. His photographs seem to give people a sense of themselves, without exploiting their self-consciousness in front of the camera. There is an enigmatic straightforwardness about the ways in which Glanville’s subjects look at the camera; it is the camera that he usually wants them to look at.

Indeed, the poignancy, the exhilaration of Glanville’s figures is that they seem to have a superstition about confidence; as though they are in awe of it, but can never quite believe in it. It is as though they are experimenting with boldness, with what it would be to be more blithely where they are, and how they happen to look. Whether or not they are flirting with defiance – and this is what makes his pictures of children so striking – they are somehow unresigned, unguarded. They are more than making do. They make us wonder, for a moment, what it would be like if embarrassment was dispensable; if we were undistracted by the consolations of shame.

What is remarkable about Glanville’s portraits, is that they remind us that what is interesting about people is not their furtiveness. That a face is not merely the silent confession of a secret life; that we can be moved by people – or perhaps that we can only be moved by people – when we are not intrigued by them. Nothing in the photographs provokes us into wanting to know more about the people, and yet nothing seems to be omitted.

If much contemporary photography works by a kind of tantalisation effect – the insistence that there is more to this image than meets the eye, and that somebody knows what it is – Glanville’s photographs seem to take it for granted that everything is already there to be seen (everything cropped, everything out of the frame, seems utterly irrelevant in these photographs; the spectator never feels that he is missing out, or is not quite in the right place). No genuine mystery depends upon the keeping of secrets; it is the artfulness of Glanville’s non-confessional art to show us just what it would be for seeing to be believing. Looking at these photographs, and being looked at by them – their unharassed openness, their unfussy clarity – is like a reinventing of curiosity. A looking at that is not even a wanting to see through; a feeling for the sufficiency of what happens to be there. The special effect of there being no special effects.

So, it is not perhaps surprising that the special effect of ordinary sunlight – the radiance of what the light was like – is almost everywhere in Glanville’s photographs. If Glanville wants us to remember that being photographed is, for most people, at best, a break in the working day and not a day’s work, it is because it is not the privileged moment that he is after, but the everyday moment. After the photograph has been taken, we know that things will carry on much as before (it’s worth noticing just how promising uniforms are for Glanville). And yet, the photographs are so vivid because they are, and because they are like, luminous excerpts; intervals rather than epiphanies. It is, Glanville wants us to notice, the provisional moment that is illuminating. If these photographs are against anything, they are against the precious and the melodramatic. They are, in other words, against distraction.