“The nicer the zoo, the more terrible” – Angela Carter.

At the end of Cissy Houston’s immortal Any Guy (1970) she spits out the last words with studiedly casual bitterness: “Is she as pretty as me, huh? Is she? Is she?” Been there? Trying to keep your confidence up, scraping together some kind of mask of dignity, coolly greeting the beloved’s new beloved, as if we really were indifferent? Appraising them, despising them, envying them, resenting them, a little later maybe even forgiving them. Moving from: “What does he see in her?” to: “He was never really right for me anyway”.

There, you’ve said it. Or even, if you’re feeling tough: “He never deserved me”. Recovery possible, no longer on the rebound. Really? A tough assignment this, going through one’s ex’s, ex’s. How do we compare ourselves to those who have supplanted us in someone else’s affections, most of all in someone else’s bed? These are angry pictures which look deceptively calm. Is this a way of taking control of the past, or of surrendering to it? Was I too fat? Was she too thin? What did he say to them about you as a lover? What did he say to you about them?

Somewhere in the back of most people’s drawers, there’s an envelope of old photographs of the ones that got away. The ones you thought you’d die for, the ones whose names you mostly can’t even remember now, the ones whose faces you look at years later and think: “What on earth did I see in them?” And sometimes, more poignantly: “How gorgeous was that?” There you are in that crowd of faces, the one person you’ve never seen face to face, yourself as someone else’s memory, you as you once were seen and felt wanted. How far was one prepared to go to please somebody else? What, if anything, does one have in common with ones fellow ex’s? Looking at a photo of one of her ex-husbands, Joan Crawford once quipped that: “He set me up on a pedestal, in order to look down on me”.

I admire the camaraderie of shared rejection in Jo Broughton’s work. Generously curious, unjudgingly celebratory, confidently uncertain, her photographs take us to places we all know but have never been before. They remind me of the letter by Chekhov, in which he said that it is sometimes much better to ask the right questions than to have the right answers.