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Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T:  Crushable

While I’ve done some recent fangirling over Ryan Gosling and Benjamin Franklin, I would have never imagined I could be in a photograph with them.  At least, not until I saw Everett Hiller’s holiday party photographs, into which he Photoshopped various celebrities.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

According to Hiller, “Every year my wife and I throw a party and when I send out the photos I add famous people.”  The results are extremely entertaining and include some amazing guests: everyone from The Rock and Tom Cruise to George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Hiller’s photographs represent an unusual extension of the kind of fan culture in which Gosling, Whitney Houston, and I Made America participate.  While the joke lies in the juxtaposition of major Hollywood celebrities with the homely setting, these recontextualizations act like fan fiction.  For example, if Shia LaBeouf is known for his alcohol-fueled antics, placing a bleary-eyed picture of him next to a smirking man builds new stories from established canon.  Having an impeccably besuited Neal Patrick Harris amidst drunken revelers winks at his How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson, who always takes perfect photographs.  Positioning Ryan Gosling among everyday partygoers expands on established Gosling meme fanon, in which Gosling is happy to talk feminism and typography with you.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

However, these kinds of images also build or serve to make arguments about the nature of the celebrities included.  For example, many Republicans accused Obama in 2008 of being a “celebrity” who was out-of-touch with Americans because he was “worr[ied] about the price of arugula”—and they’re still making that argument today.  The above image, which integrates Obama in the middle of a middle-class (and otherwise white) party, visually argues that Obama is a Regular Joe who exists on the same level as his fellow citizens. The surprise of the guy in the green hat behind him even naturalizes him into the setting insofar as it would probably be a huge shock for most of us to meet Obama in some guy’s living room.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Outside of a political context, however, picturing Tom Cruise cackling while posed on a piñata reinforces the narrative of Cruise as a crazed Scientologist, a narrative that has been used to criticize Scientology’s practices.  These photographs work based on an idea of celebrity that is simultaneously near and far: celebrities are both just like us and stand out in the crowd.  Hiller’s Photoshopping makes the famous blend in naturally and unnoticeably with their surroundings but also invites viewers to play a game of Where’s Waldo, looking to see how many late-night comedians stand in the background.  As Joseph Roach defines celebrity as the possession of “it” or “the arresting, charismatic power of celebrities,” these photographs arrest the celebrities within a visual frame and encourage the viewers to sympathetically merge themselves with them.

Image Credit: Newsweek

This seems like a pretty benign use of Photoshopping technology; however, the placement (and displacement, in the case of Hillary Clinton) of celebrities in new contexts can have the power to shock and disgust.  The above image created by Newsweek to grace their magazine cover drew outrage from those who thought Tina Brown was tasteless to put a dead Princess Diana next to the daughter-in-law she will never know.  The accompany story, which imagines how Diana might have been at 50, is a kind of fanfiction, but the picture’s power meant that more people focused on it.  What we can see from this is that while anybody with the money can create any sort of fictionalized image, Photoshop’s rhetoric is governed by decorum.  Using the technology to make funny pictures is fine, but it’s not allowed to pervert truth—probably because it’s so easy to do just that.  If perception is reality, Photoshop is a powerful actor in the war of words—and a valuable tool for retooling actors.