viz.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s Arnold Newman: Masterclass exhibit with a photographer friend helped me notice more than Newman’s numerous famous subjects. Creating a portrait requires more than just telling someone to smile or to stand in fair light; good photographers must understand how composition affects the final product. Framing matters, whether that’s done by putting wood around a picture or deciding where and how you crop the shot. The exhibit allows visitors to examine Newman’s artistic process, showing the evidence of how he edited his raw photographs into finished portraits. I want to look at in this post both his famous shot of Igor Stravinsky and his created “portrait” of Marilyn Monroe to think more about what we can learn about visual and non-visual editorial practice.

Image Credit: screenshot from Buzzfeed.com

Beyonce's publicist has created quite a media stir about photographs taken of the star's Super Bowl performance.  On Tuesday this person apparently requested that Buzzfeed remove several "unflattering" images from the "33 Fiercest Moments from Beyonce's Halftime Show" gallery.  The request was fruitless, considering the photos are still up; but it may have served a hidden purpose in igniting a flurry of posts, like Huffington's, that deny Beyonce has ever taken an unflattering photo.  As the title suggests, Buzzfeed's controversial story adopts a playful, celebratory tone rather than a critical or parodic one. Its string of increasingly intense photos and enthusiastic captions create a mounting sense of the star's "ferocity," culminating in her mock deification ("Beysus knelt down to bless the audience") and popular coronation ("basically every moment was fierce...Because she's Queen B"). So why would anyone view this as bad publicity?

My hunch is that the publicist does not actually view the photos as damaging, but rather, understands the popular fascination with that which is deemed "unflattering." Labeling the actions or images of a celebrity as unflattering heightens the public's interest in them, and the resulting mediated exchange of criticism and support for the star is what's known as buzz. But in Beyonce's case, the unflattering label has been applied in an unusual way. This blog post explores why that is, and how the special deployment of this label asks us to readjust our idea of what's artificial and what's real.