viz. - celebrity

The Most Democratic Selfie?

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:35:11 +0000

Image Source: eonline

"By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and the charming scenes of history" -Baudelaire

After last week’s Oscar’s ceremony, a number of critics lauded Ellen DeGeneres’s performance as “warm,” "accessible,” and most interestingly, “democratic.” The gimmick, of course, which earned her the most attention was the big Oscar’s Selfie. After all, what could be more charming than everyone’s favorite celebrities acting like ordinary people; seemingly thrilled at the mere chance to be on television? Thinking about this selfie, and the comment that Ellen was so “democratic” brought to mind the oft touted expression that photography is “the great democratic medium.” In an interesting way, the Oscar’s Selfie is the perfect encapsulation of that saying.

The original reason for referring to photography as the democratic medium was because it blurred the class lines between the haves and have-nots. By today’s standards, where democratic photography means publishing photos of high stakes life and death revolutions on Facebook and other forms of social media, that might sound tame. But in the nineteenth century – the camera was a revolutionary tool in its own right, as it paved the way for a more empowered polity by contributing to the erasure between high and low culture.

By way of example of this tension, take Baudelaire’s famous polemic against photography and the plebeian masses from 1859, “In these deplorable times,” Baudelaire warned, “a new industry has developed,”

"An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah . . . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers" (Baudelaire 296).

It was also fittingly, a revolution which, from the start, was affiliated with acting. In a quote that is, by today’s standards, bemusing and irate, Baudelaire raves about ordinary people re-enacting scenes from history:

"Strange abominations manifested themselves. By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and the charming scenes of history" (Baudelaire 296). For Baudelaire, re-enacting the scenes of history was best left to master painters with proper training, not any "washerwoman" with access to a camera.

In the nineteenth century, photographs were often used for the purpose Baudelaire describes: to re-create scenes from the past. Perhaps we see the same impulse in our modern cinema being used to recreate the past. But to be clear, Baudelaire’s objection is not against all acting. It’s against the democratic masses “any rascals” or “washerwomen” believing that they, too, could represent the “tragic and the charming scenes of history” without the proper training, without the proper sanctified feeling of high-class stage actors. A sanctioned high art operation like the academy is not what’s under fire here. As Baudelaire continues, the actor is still “sublime.”

"Some democratic writer must have seen in that a cheap means of spreading the dislike of history and painting amongst the masses, thus committing a double sacrilege, and insulting, at one and the same time, the divine art of painting and the sublime art of the actor. It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite[i]" (Baudelaire 296).

It’s easy to see why members of the academy want to be in league with that wily democratic writer instead of the elite stage actor; why the stereoscope, an inexpensive and popular parlor amusement which was an early form of cinema, seems the cooler, more American side of history to be on. But don’t the members of our Oscar’s Selfie (like Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, etc.) have a closer kinship to the celebrated “high culture” actors of the stage? So really, how democratic is Ellen’s performance and her Oscar’s Selfie?

The selfie wasn’t this year’s Oscar’s only attempt at seeming democratic. Nearly all of the skits and jokes from this year's ceremony showed a preoccupation with the erasure between high and low culture; an erasure most often performed through social media. Take Jimmy Fallon’s opening sketch, where he visits a “troll” tweeter who is insulting actress’s dresses. After zapping into her living room, he grabs her hand and the camera zooms to her fingers for extra effect. In a mock interrogation he asks that random everywoman with disdain: “what’s on your nails? Cheetos?” Then there’s the world’s luckiest pizza delivery guy sketch, where “one of us” gets plucked out of obscurity (and tipped graciously).

But why bother with all of these social media and everyman stand ins? Is it possible that our stars are afraid of losing fans to the more democratic enertainment forms on social media? Or do they pretend to be, so as to appear more like us? It’s a loop. Photography’s democratic promise has always been galvanized by a populist threat. With the photograph, one didn’t need a painter for a portrait, and eventually, people could make their own art. The selfie is the latest revolution in that vein: an instant portrait of the self one can take hundreds of at a moment– but could we ever be our own celebrities? And do we like the selfie because it’s that carrot at the end of the stick? It promises us that maybe, someday, we too could breathe that rarefied air.

Ellen and Jennifer Lawrence are two stars who have made a career out of this circular relationship between fame and us “ordinary people.” Midway through the show, Ellen shows that she’s a fan too (just like us!), when she fangirlishly pockets Lupita’s Nyong’o’s lip balm while collecting tips for the man who will only be known as The Pizza Guy. Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence tripped (again!) on her way in, and everyone loved her all the more for it, because it was the kind of mistake "real" people would make.

Morever, the selfie in question offers catharsis by showing gracious and glamorous people in a very ordinary scramble for affection and popularity (poor Jared Leto was cropped out). The Simpson’s Oscar Selfie spoof is humorous because of this: it shows the underdog homer, being trampled underfoot. And then there’s the playful reminders that Luptia Nyong’o’s brother, Peter Nyong’o, is “just a college kid” who got into the shot. On the Ellen show this was a cue for uproarious laughter, as Ellen notes that Lupita, the recognized Hollywood star, is left in the back, but . . wait, why is that funny? Because, like the pizza guy, Ellen is implying that Peter Nyong'o is an everyman who doesn’t belong, but celebrities welcome him anyway (just for the designated Warholian 15 minutes that social media provides). Aha, right. So again, how democratic is it, really?

Still it’s impossible to escape the elephant in the room: that the Oscar’s was sponsored by Samsung Galaxy, and that all of these selfies were intermittently interrupted by commercials for the same phone that Ellen kept waving around. There are those who will say that it’s just grandstanding to say that photography is the democratic medium in light of a celebrity photo op like this; that some can’t afford a camera. Whatever the case, it does seem nice that the re-tweets inspired Samsung to give $3 million divided evenly between St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and The Humane Society of the United States. But what I find most interesting is the charitable message of the photo: that you, too, can be famous. And if that's the case, are we a step closer to completely decentralizing the old system of celebrity culture, anyway?

[i] Charles Baudelaire. Trans. P.E. Charvat. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1972.) Print.

Documentation of Loss – Observing Failure in the Modern Olympics

Laura Thain — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:17:50 +0000

Olympic fencer Shin A-Lam of South Korea remains in the arena to contest an unfavorable ruling without the expected stoicism. Image credit: Korea Bang

What does it mean to document loss? What is its rhetorical function? Rhetoric of Celebrity student Iva Kinnaird assembles an archive of defeat from several Olympic games, tracing the intersections of celebrity and sportsmanship. The documentation of loss, she asserts, commodifies defeat and makes it available for public consumption. The result is a strange rhetorical landscape where the lines between winning and losing become less easy to determine.

“The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

- Pierre de Coubertin, Father of the modern Olympic Games

Photo Finish

With athletes seemingly nearing the uppermost limits of a performance asymptote, it is necessary to improve technology to measure these near indiscernible differences. When one hundredth of a second is the difference between gold and silver, the cameras must be able to record that highly precise moment.

Image Source: Openwaterpedia

Photographs tend to resist abstraction, non-figuration. Photography is unique in its ability to capture the image of something realistically. It can mechanically or exactly record things without the influence of a human bias, although man’s interpretation of said image is another story.

Voyeurism

Image Source: Undisputed Legal

Cameras measure success through the information that they record. With a broader definition how that can be measured, it could be said that an athlete’s strength in character (despite their athletic performance) is what makes them successful.

The emotional nature of some events has “raised spectator voyeurism to an uncomfortable level” (Williams). The viewers want to relate on an emotional level, and that involves seeing the joy or, in many cases, the disappointment in the eyes of the competitors. The close proximity of the cameras is a simple formal way of placing the viewer in the middle of the action, allowing them to more easily feel the weight of any given emotion.

Beautiful Losers

Image Source: Variations on Normal

The trend of honoring dramatic losses and idolizing athletes who lose heroically has not gone unnoticed.

A proposed fourth podium for “when an athlete is either extremely rubbish or gets an injury, but still finishes the race” seems to be an idea that is already metaphorically taking place (Wilcox). It is an occurrence which seems to elicit support from the crowd despite their differences in nationality.

Image Source: Ameblo

Derek Redman, a frontrunner in the 400m sprint at the 1992 Barcelona games is now famously an icon for perseverance and who defines “the essence of the human and Olympic spirit.” Despite coming in last, he provided the public with one of those moments that “remind us what the Olympics are all about” (Barcelona).

This is a problematic situation where the public has turned his devastation into an inspirational moment, denying him agency in the process. His heartbreaking loss is now our Visa commercial.

From a viewer’s perspective, limping across the finish line was a show of his grace in defeat. Interviews with Redmond reveal a different reason for his struggle: his “belief that if he limped fast enough he might still overtake four people and qualify for the final.” (Burnton). It was not heroic strength in character that drove him; it was his delusion acting as a shield from despair.

There is a noble thought that elevating these moments will act as some sort of consolation prize, but what it is really doing is trapping the athlete in that moment by limiting the public’s perception within the confines of a single memorable event. This stagnant image prevents them from moving on.

The video of the race on YouTube sentimentalizes the moment right up to the point of being mawkish. As if the raw footage of a man’s crushed dreams is not enough to convey the heartbreak of the moment, Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” is overlaid.

The footage is edited to elicit sympathy and admiration towards Derek. The video of the race is interlaid with text explaining each moment of the travesty. At the end the text reads “When you don’t give up, YOU CANNOT FAIL!” (Warning). This slogan, of course, is completely illogical; a person is perfectly capable of failing just as many times as they try*[1]. The inspirational message is understood nonetheless. The result of all this is a contrived sappy documentation skewing the memory of the event (Brackets).

When losing is losing

Image Source: Postgrad Problems

Winners who lose - McKayla

McKayla Maroney was the obvious favorite to win the gold in the vault competition. She was expected to win by a wide margin. But when it came down to her actual performance on the day, she faltered. Even in her failure we have elevated her to fame. She is famous for being disappointed with her medal. “She’s so good that she’s probably the only one who doesn’t even have to perform to win the gold” (Macur). An audience can become accustomed to an athlete’s high performance when they are consistently exceptional. Viewed individually, they would all be spectacular, but when seen one after the other they become desensitized to the awesomeness of their capabilities. We expect them to win by exceptional standards. It all goes back to a person’s expectations for their performance relative to others. As was the case with Maroney, one's expectations may be so high that anything less than gold becomes unimpressive.

When winning is losing

Image Source: Fit Sugar

One of the most famous moments in the modern history of gymnastics is Kerri Strug’s 1996 Vault. The defining moment of her career came down to her performing a gold winning vault with an injured leg. The moment of victory was replayed in a countdown of the “30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments” (Brackets). We are given these stories in the format of a countdown which attempts to quantify the weight of an emotional connection. The video documenting the event plays up Kerri’s struggle and the victory that it earns her and her country. The darker reality that is seldom talked about in relation to this moment is the implications of the injury Strug incurred. She snagged the gold in the team final but was unable to compete in her individual event.

It is replayed as a victory for the American team, and it was, in a way, but it was also a crushing defeat for the athlete on an individual level. At the bottom of the video “Due to her injury, Kerri Strug was unable to compete in the individual all-around competition and event finals, despite having qualified for both.” Once again, inspirational music is overlaid. With both this video and the Derek Redmond clip, the moment is sentimentalized to mask the disparity between what occurred to the athlete and the way an audience wishes to perceive that occurrence.

When losing is winning (maybe) - Badminton

Image Source: Yahoo! Sports

The Greeks aspired to win for the sake of eternal glory. “They were also given all manner of material rewards by the cities they represented, but the original goal was to establish everlasting fame on earth, the sure route to immortality” (Williams). In this case, competing well in their sport consequently proving their athleticism was the way to remain in the public’s consciousness. Now, with different modes of achieving longevity in the public eye through celebrity, there are different, less straightforward, ways of being remembered. This begs the question - do you have to win in your event if the goal is to be remembered? The answer, given the current climate of celebrity culture: of course not. People are remembered for anything seen as being an outlier in the traditional winner narrative. One major qualifier to the winner’s narrative is the basic requirement that they must win.

In the scandalous badminton tournament placement match which the Chinese and South Korean women’s teams both ‘threw’, the players became infamous for their strategy of losing. What infuriated viewers most was not that they lost, but that they did so without even trying to conceal their intent. It is rare for blatant misconduct to occur at this level, and “in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport” (Belson). The misconduct is “complicated by the fact that the rules of the sport seemed to give the athletes an incentive to lose” (Belson). Although the teams were disqualified for their actions, they achieved something that no other badminton teams ever have. They created a story interesting enough to live on in the memory of the viewer. The commentator said of the strategy during the match, “This, I’m very sorry to say, could be one of the biggest news stories of the games so far” The YouTube replays of the match in question revealed it was eighteen times as popular as the video of the final match in which determined the gold medalist. By the Greek standards of what is implicit with victory, it is arguable that, although the players lost, they still reached an early goal of the games, and therefore won. The idea of victory and of failure is relative and dependent on what makes up one’s own personal goals.

With the increasing capabilities to deliver information to an audience, there is a focus on reactions to loss and the sportsmanship that goes along with it. The myth of how an athlete won or lost overshadows their results. The Olympics has become not just about winning or losing--it is more about how that win or loss is recorded and repeated back to an audience .

[1] This is dependent on a person’s definition of failure. A quick Google dictionary search brings the result “lack of success” is broad enough to allow their use to be true.

Works Cited

"Barcelona 1992 ." Derek Anthony Redmond. Olympic.org, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Belson, Ken. "Olympic Ideal Takes Beating In Badminton." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Aug. 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.

Brackets, Joe. "30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments." N.p., 23 Apr. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Burnton, Simon. "50 Stunning Olympic Moments No3: Derek Redmond and Dad Finish 400m." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 May 0030. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Macur, Juliet. "American Slips at the Finish, Losing Her Grip on the Gold." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

"Pierre De Coubertin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Apr. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

WARNING: You Will Cry While Watching This. Perf. Derek Redmond and Josh Groban. YouTube. YouTube, 22 May 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Wilcox, Dominic. "Beautiful Losers." Variations on Normal. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Williams, Gregory. "Better Luck Next Time." Cabinet Summer 2002: n. pag. Cabinet Magazine. Web. 27 Apr. 2013.

Who Wore it Better? Kimye Edition

Laura Thain — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:33:04 +0000

Image Credit: Entertainmentwise

Celebrity fashion is a no-holds-barred spectators’ sport, and, like the fashion industry itself, it features and targets women as its primary audience. Free Thought blogger Greta Christina described the language of fashion succinctly in her recent post “Fashion is a Feminist Issue”, arguing that if we interpret fashion as a “language of sorts…an art form, even,” we can begin to view fashion as “one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men.” But, she continues, “it’s [no] accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.”

This post seeks to read the rhetoric of celebrity fashion coverage in light of remarks like those of Greta Christina. How can we read celebrity fashion as an arena that in principle grants women more freedom than men, but in practice consistently limits the freedom of both men and women to express themselves? How do the voyeuristic, hypercritical impulses of celebrity media intersect and inform the world of fashion, particularly women’s fashion? I take as my case study here the much-photographed couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, sometimes known as a couple by their nickname “Kimye.”

Image Source: Kendall and Kylie

I’ll begin my examination with a convention of celebrity fashion coverage—the “who wore it better” genre. In its most serious iteration, the formula encourages competition among fashionable women of means by enlisting an audience of fashionable women without means as judges. Most often, the comparison is inspired by two celebrities wearing an identical piece of fashion, usually from a premiere designer’s current season. In the race to consume runway fashion, celebrities are pitted against one another to not only be the first to sport a fresh-off-the-runway look, but to also wear it better than the competition that will inevitably follow. And anyone who’s done their homework on fashion marketing knows that, while the choices offered by mass-market or “commercial” fashion are vast, high-end designers promote their brand by strategically limiting supply and in order to create an illusion of exclusivity. Celebrity stylists must compete viciously to bring the runway to the red carpet as quickly as possible, but because of the particular way in which exclusivity and reproduction oppose each other in the market of high-end fashion, repeat-fashion choices are granted to audiences to sort out—a mechanism that also helps assuage the ordinary audience’s feelings of exclusion. Only one woman can “own” the look—so who wore it better?

Image Source: Us Magazine

Of course, as much as tabloids present photographs as hard evidence, many factors matter in how an audience responds to the choice between two celebrities in the same outfit. Besides the unstable nature of the content itself (lighting, pose, position, composition, etc.), context also matters. Kim, for instance, is often matched up against one of her sisters (as are Kylie and Khloe in the larger spread above), making an intertextual argument about Kardashian fashion and celebrity status as a separate category from other A-listers. Kim is paired with her sisters to highlight behaviors that exclude them from mainstream celebrity status: they (gasp!) share clothes; they are reality show stars and not movie stars; they prefer Louis Vuitton and Gucci to Marchesa and Chanel.

Tabloids don’t only use Kim’s fashion choices as evidence that she doesn’t belong with other A-list celebrities. Tabloid media often uses them as to openly mock her, as well.

Image Source: We Know Memes

Image Source: College Humor

Image Source: Robin Williams' Twitter

All of these examples lambast Kim for her weight gain during pregnancy or her refusal to wear conventional maternity clothes. Kim’s signature, curve-hugging style becomes the greatest source of tabloid fixation and ridicule, rather than praise. Because Kim’s curvy body can no longer be sexualized and consumed, she becomes as a ridiculed, mocked commodity instead.

Interestingly, we can trace this shift well before Kim’s pregnancy. When the reality star began dated Kanye West in March of 2012, celebrity media speculated over how Kanye’s reputation for dressing his girlfriends might affect Kim, who rarely strayed far from her signature, curve-hugging, leather-and-spandex style. Kardashian’s reality show even featured an episode in which West loaned Kim his stylist and gave her closet a makeover.

As soon as Kim started stepping out in looser, more daring, more “editorial” or “high fashion” clothing, she received harsher criticism in the fashion press than ever before. Kim had made her mark by wearing body-conscious status-designer clothes (that is, mass-marketed and expensive but readily available designer fodder like Vuitton, D&G, Gucci, Versace); her transition into high-end, couture fashion (like the Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy dress above) was met with resistance by tabloid press and audiences alike. What was sexy, leather studs-and-animal print Kardashian doing trying to wear sleek, demure French designers?

But Kim can’t win no matter what she wears--if she meets expectations in hip-hugging, cleavage-bearing LBDs, the tabloids commodify her sexuality but call her trashy or tasteless; if she defies expectations in loose silhouettes or bolder colors, the tabloids instead portray her as inauthentic, posturing, a parvenu.

Image Source: NY Daily News

Image Credit: Loop 21

Now that I have demonstrated some potential strictures placed upon women in an arena that claims to privilege expression and artistry, I’d like to extend those arguments to Kanye West and suggest how issues of class and gender affect men’s forays into fashion, as well.

Kanye West, the self-proclaimed “Louis Vuitton Don”, is himself no stranger to fashion controversy. But while, as I’ve argued above, Kim struggles against classicism in her efforts to establish a powerful fashion ethos, Kanye must battle much more stringent gender norms in his pursuit of fashion superstardom.

Image Source: Red Carpet Fashion Awards

Below, Rihanna wears a mensware jacket to the notice of no one but a minor fashion blog. Women wearing menswear is about as subversive as a puppy in a kitten costume—far from the controversial political and anti-establishment statement androgyny made in the fashion world of the 1960s, elements of menswear in women’s fashion are accepted and, to an extent, expected in 2013.

Image Source: The Telegraph

Not so for men's fashion. When Kanye West donned a kilt-style skirt for a Hurricane Sandy benefit concert last fall, he received so much flack from both the press and fellow hip-hop artist and MC Lord Jamar that he asked that Getty Images remove all photos of him performing in the skirt. Lord Jamar released a biting criticism of West’s dress in the song “Lift up Your Skirt,” which he heavily annotated on the rap annotation site RapGenius.

Verse 1 from Lord Jamar's song. Image Source: Screencapture from Rap Genius

Lord Jamar's personal annotations on Rap Genius. Image Source: Rap Genius

It’s not only Kanye’s fashion choices, but his interest in fashion, that feminizes him in the eyes of elements of the hip-hop community and the fashion tabloid media. Yet, just as Kim’s recent fashion choices increasingly buck her “bod-icon” status and experiment with self-expression, Kanye asserts his interest and his choices subversively, even when (or especially when?) those fashion choices fail to enhance his reputation as a fashion icon. I’d like to close with one last “who wore it better?” to drive this point home:

Image Source: Fashion Bomb Daily

Kanye West may be wearing the same women’s wear shirt as Jessica Simpson, but damn it, he’s wearing it better!

Sources of Fame: Photographer or Subject?

Laura Thain — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 21:47:13 +0000

An Arnold Newman "selfie" from 1987. Image credit: The Jewish Museum

One of my favorite parts of the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibition on Arnold Newman is the way it resists chronology. Newman’s photographs are organizes by particular attention to one of ten elements of Newman’s photography as artistic practice: “searches,” “choices,” “fronts,” “geometries,” “habitats,” “lumen,” “rhythms,” “sensibilities,” “signatures,” and “weavings.” What results is an exhibit that resists a notion of Arnold Newman’s transformation over time. Instead, the exhibit suggests, audiences might read Newman by his unique manipulation of photography’s formal elements throughout his entire career.

The resistance to chronology is apparent, too, in the weaving, wandering nature of the physical exhibit. Temporary half-walls throughout the exhibition space designate no beginning or end point for audiences. Instead, the exhibit inspires audiences to accept Newman’s particular artistic practice across ten themes as definitive criteria for photographic excellence, and therefore evidence for celebrating the photographer himself.

Such a construction has encouraged me to think about the relationship between celebrated photographer and celebrated subject. Are there ways that these two categories inform each other in the case of Arnold Newman? Can we trace, even amidst the Harry Ransom Center’s achronological curation, a chronological shift in fame from photographer to photographed? How does fame work as a mechanism for those who garner fame by representing it and perhaps cultivating it? Can those who represent fame create it as well?

To accomplish such a task, I’d like to begin by examining some of Newman’s early portrait subjects. I’ve limited myself to what the Ransom Center has included in their exhibition in the exploration below. Each portrait contains a “fame ratio” rating, which I’ve calculated by dividing the amount of google hits the portrait subject and the search term “Arnold Newman” receive by the amount of google hits the portrait subject alone receives. The closer the fame ratio gets to one, the more, we might infer, that the fame of the portrait subject from a 2013 perspective depends on their portrayal by Arnold Newman.

Image Credit: Chris Beetles

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 1941 [Fame ratio: .46]

[Google search results in 55,300 results]

[of those results, 25,600 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Without doing further archival research, I can say little about Kuniyoshi other than to assert he was an arguably minor figure in the New York art scene, especially in 1941, ten years after producing his most well-known works. Newman’s portrait of Kuniyoshi was probably mutually beneficial for Newman early in his career and Kuniyoshi late in his; now, evidence from Google suggests that Kuniyoshi is more reknowned for being Newman’s photographic subject than for his own innovating work in photography and lithography.

It is no coincidence that Newman was interested in Kuniyoshi; the two shared a similar interest in employing the naturalistic tradition in urban spaces.

Other portraits included from 1941:

Image Credit: iCollector

Raphael Soyer [Fame ratio: .22]

[Google search results in 77,500 results]

[of those results, 16,800 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Image Credit: Phillip Koch Paintings

Edward Hopper [fame ratio: .03]

[Google search results in 1.76 million results]

[of those results, 49,200 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Image Credit: Artnet

John French Sloan [Fame ratio: .02]

[Google search results in 300,000 results]

[of those results, 5,000 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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The trend of this data suggests that during 1941, Newman was able to establish a presence in the New York art community and transition from photographing minor figures to more major ones. However, the more famous the artist at the time Newman captured his photograph, the less their fame (present and future) depended upon their role as Newman’s photographic subject.

The exhibition also suggests that Newman’s 1941 photographs had a dramatic effect on the demand for his portraiture. Having achieved a reputation with his iconic 1941 photos, by 1942, Newman was no longer photographing minor figures. His subjects included arguably the most popular artists of the mid-century: Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.

Image Credit: Anthony Luke Photography

Marc Chagall, 1942 [Fame ratio: .01]

[Google search results in 4.2 million hits]

[of those hits, only 65,700 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Image Credit: Rice Cracker

Max Ernst, 1942 [Fame ratio: .004]

[Google search results in 2.34 million hits]

[of those hits, only 9,800 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

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By 1946, Newman was photographing the likes of Igor Stravinsky (perhaps Newman’s most iconic photograph) and Gore Vidal; figures of such fame seem to indicate that Newman’s portraiture had, by the mid 1940s, become an emblem or indication of celebrity, rather than a component in the creation of celebrity for the photographic subject.

This is not to say that Newman lost interest in photographing people who did not enjoy mass fame. Over the course of his career, Newman continued to photograph subjects whom he thought were influential or significant to modern life. Not all of those figures were vindicated by the test of time.

I would like to close, however, by suggesting that Newman’s own work enjoys an iconic status in its own right, even when the significance of the photographic subject has been forgotten. (We might, for instance, return to my first example of Yasuo Kuniyoshi.) Newman often insisted that his photographs must speak as both textually (that is, technically) and contextually competent objects. This is how we might define “iconic” in the case of Newman. The object must communicate meaning both in its composition and in its subtext. As Newman argues, "Successful portraiture is like a three-legged stool. Kick out one leg and the whole thing collapses. In other words, visual ideas combined with technological control combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold its own." In this way, a viewer might experience the lesser-known figures of the Newman exhibit as a sort of “death of the subject” akin to Foucault’s “death of the author.” In relieving the subject as the primary element of a photograph, we might, in the case of Newman’s archive, let the photographer speak.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Press(ing) Matter

Sarah Orem — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: BBC News

Only a scant 23 days elapsed after TMZ leaked nude photos of Prince Harry that French tabloid Closer printed images of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless on the balcony of a Provence guesthouse. In addition to the frenzied speculation about the photos themselves (Is the queen upset with her grandson? Was Middleton truly in private, since she was photographed on a terrace? Are there more images that will emerge?) it’s interesting to note that the press itself has been the subject of equal amounts of scrutiny.

The issue of where these revealing pictures would be published quickly became one of the most discussed aspects of this story. While UK’s The Sun printed Prince Harry’s photos on its front page, the same tabloid refused to publish indiscreet images of Kate. The royal family has brought a lawsuit against Closer for a breach of privacy. And, CNN speculates that since TMZ ran Prince Harry’s images before any British newspaper, it might mean that 1) the American press effectively “scooped” their English counterparts and, 2) that digital media is outpacing print journalism. Though Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge are – literally – on display in this controversy, the press has become just as visible as the royal family.

Image Credit: Reuters

Visual texts, such as paparazzi photos and newsstand images, have become the site for a global conversation about the our right to privacy (or publicity). Many journalists claim that Kate’s photos represent “an invasion of privacy,” since she and her husband were on a “remote property” when captured on film. Conversely, columnists have seized Prince Harry’s photos as evidence of his “wild ways,” deeming the young man irresponsible for allowing the images to surface publicly. Here, visual objects allow journalists to rhetorically construct the ethos of those represented in the images.

By employing the language of the public/private split, news writers unwittingly wade into a long-standing scholarly debate on the same subject. It’s curious (or very, very appropriate) to see Kate Middleton’s images associated with privacy (which was “brutal[ly]” invaded), while the visual documentation of Prince Harry’s partying has been labeled “indisputably in the public domain.” Public sphere theorist Michael Warner points out in Publics and Counterpublics (2005) that women have long been associated with the private sphere (the home, the family) while “masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space” (24). Though both members of the royal family could have reasonably expected privacy while undressing – Kate at a friend’s home, Harry in a hotel suite – journalists locate the Duchess’s nudity in the private sphere, and the Prince’s in public.

Not only are the distinctions between public and private increasingly articulated in visual terminology, as I argue above, but they are also defined on and through the medium of the body. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz unpacks the many significations we commonly heap onto the body in Volatile Bodies (1994): embodiment often becomes the physical locus for distinctions between

reason and passion, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and so on. (3)

It seems that royal bodies bear an especially hefty portion of the conceptual weight we assign to the flesh as matter. Both the Duchess Catherine and Prince Harry’s bodies have become the site for a global discussion about the public vs. the private.

These sovereign bodies have also been used to flesh out (pun intended) our contemporary attitudes towards sex. The press has criticized Prince Harry’s licentiousness and lauded Her Highness’ sense of family duty, and I speculate that the disparity between these two reactions has something to do with the context in which their bodies appear. Middleton’s photos locate her in the frame of a heterosexual, monogamous, married, relationship. Swirling pregnancy rumors also link her sexuality with procreation. Reporters implicitly assign her to what Gayle Rubin calls the “Charmed Circle” of “good, normal, natural” sex. Rubin outlines the differences between taboo and accepted sexual practices in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” even providing a succinct chart to illustrate her argument.

Image Credit: University of Victoria

The press positions Prince Harry’s sexuality in Rubin’s “Outer Limits,” or, what dominant culture often deems “bad, abnormal, unnatural” sex. Since the images depict the young prince alongside several similarly unclothed women, media sources accuse him of participating in casual, promiscuous, and unmarried sex. His activities are seen as non-procreative and in a group, as opposed to within a relationship. Rubin’s writing might explain why journalistic rhetoric holds Prince Harry culpable for his own photos while exonerating the Duchess of Cambridge: his body is linked to non-normative sex, and hers isn’t.

Some tabloid websites, including The Hollywood Gossip, suggest that the leak of Harry’s photos “constitutes an epic failure on his handlers’ part.” The website argues that both Prince Harry and his “people” were “either clueless or careless” by not forcing the women with whom Harry was pictured to hand over their phones before the party began. This article implicitly raises the issue of control, blaming Harry for failing to reign in not only his own behavior, but the actions of those around him as well. This terminology of bodily control evokes the logic of Cartesian dualism, in which the activity of the mind gets contrasted with the inert body. The Cartesian theorization of the body typically reads corporeality in “naturalistic, organic, passive, inert terms, seeing it as an intrusion on or interference with the operation of the mind, a brute givenness which requires overcoming” (Grosz 3-4). Western philosophy typically construes the body as a blank slate onto which cultural norms get projected, or, as formless matter awaiting shape from the thinking mind.

Image Credit: PerezHilton.com

In being shocked by the prince’s lack of control, casting him as “careless,” the rhetoric of many journalists links up with the long-standing tradition of viewing the body as brute matter in need of discipline. Relying on and perpetuating the logics of Cartesian binarism, websites like The Hollywood Gossip condemn the prince because he refuses to “overcome” bodily excess. Because this rhetoric suggests the prince possesses an out-of-control corporeality, he is feminized. To return again to Grosz’s explication of Cartesianism, she points out that within the mind/body distinction, the “coupling of mind with maleness” leads to the association of “the body with femaleness” (4). Masculinity is graced with knowledge, thought, and enlightened rationalism, and femininity is bound to bodily excess. Unlike his sister-in-law, whose marital status the press seizes as an example of control and discipline (affording to her the privilege of masculinity’s “disavowal of the body”?), Prince Harry is constructed in feminine terminology by popular rhetoric (Grosz 4).

My final thoughts on this matter concern how the actions of the popular press affect even the most pedestrian, un-famous individuals (like you or me). The now ubiquitous claim that the press wronged Kate Middleton by invading her privacy has suggestive ramifications. By saying that photographers breached her privacy we imply that privacy is somehow sacred, or a space where an individual can exert control over their body. Does this association between privacy and autonomy correlate to the idea that publicity is not sacred? Put another way: if Middleton should have been protected under the guise of her privacy, would she not be protected in a public setting? I’ll admit, the question sounds a bit silly. But, I’d like to believe that even in public spaces we have the right to control our bodies, how they are represented, and what’s done to them. Personally, I would rather frame the issue in terms of consent: the widespread publication of these photos troubles me because neither Prince Harry nor the Duchess of Cambridge were given the opportunity to consent to the literally global display of their bodies.

I Turn My Camera On, Then My Photoshop

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:51:58 +0000

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.

Communal Remembering - The Johnny Cash Project

Cate Blouke — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:17:23 +0000

Screen Shot of the video opening in The Johnny Cash Project

Cyber memorials are interesting beasts. A new, more publicly available way to mourn, they are often sites of controversy - raising questions about representation, curation and the appropriation of tragedy. But what happens when a multimedia memorial invites visitors to actively participate in the creation and curation of the content? A hyper-mediated explosion of awesome (among other things).

Screen shot of frame contribution from Bobby Latham, McKinney, Texas

The Johnny Cash Project is a virtual space better explored than explained, but I'll do my best to give you an idea. Visitors are invited to contribute drawings of Cash to be included in a sort of hybrid rotoscope music video, the frames of which flash by in a psychedelic flurry of grayscale images. You can pause the video at any point to explore the frames individually, and you can even watch the"drawing session" in which the image was created.

Screen shot of the filtered viewing options

Visitors are also encouraged to rate the drawings, and the video can then be viewed from a variety of perspectives - the highest rated frames, the director curated frames, the most recent frames, and more. The project is incredibly malleable and interactive. It gives visitors an extreme sense of agency in both controlling their own experience and contributing to the experience of the memorial as a whole.

Screen shot of rame contribution from Marc Verhaegen, Merksem, Belgium

The project bills itself as a "living," "communal" work, and the language is interesting in terms of its push towards vitality, especially given the song selection - "Ain't No Grave." The idea is that the project will continue to grow, creating "a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the man in black." It encourages a sense of assimilation and immortality. People can become a part of Cash himself (or at least the remembrance of him) by contributing an image to the collection, and the "portrait" will continue to live on.

All in all, the project raises interesting questions about mourning, memorial, agency and ownership. Aside from being a pretty amazing piece of hyper-mediated content, it's certainly a very democratic approach to memorial.

Naomi-art

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:57:18 +0000

Naomi Campbell -- not her career, not her art, but her body -- is the subject of Art Photo Expo's contribution to Miami's art festival, Art Basel Miami Beach, this year.

This photograph, by Seb Janiak, is one of fifty included in the expo. New York Times readers expressed dismay at this bit of news on the Times's fashion blog. "You guys are kidding, right? Why is Naomi Campbell art?" wrote one. It's a fair question. Checking out the images included on the blog, it becomes apparent that Campbell's body is, in fact, art -- or at least that it serves an artistic purpose. This has always been the case for models, women and men who make their livings (and photographers' careers) off of using their bodies for artistic ends, like living sculptures, walking canvases. What might be new about this particular exhibit is its specificity, its focus not on fashion or photography per se, but on one woman's iconic image. Move over, Marilyn?

He knows us so well

LaurenMitchell — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:54:03 +0000

This photo of Adrien Grenier had me totally pegged as I perused celebrity blog perezhilton.com in an effort not to do any of my real work.

But I really like the idea of a celebrity sending a message back to us, observing what we are doing at that very moment in such a completely accurate way while we try (or maybe Perez Hilton tries) to describe and make judgments about what he's up to.

I'm reminded of those shirts Britney Spears used to wear, in that those were sort of an anticipation of what the viewer was thinking about her, instead of about what, in this case, the viewer is doing.

In both of these cases there's a weird fusion of watching, making judgments, and sending messages that make reciprocal judgments all in one image.

I'm Jack Nicholson and I approve this message

Jillian Sayre — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:27:50 +0000

Today I was introduced to Jack Nicholson's video endorsement of Clinton. It is currently making the rounds on YouTube:

Here's the problem I see with his montage-style endorsement: Nicholson lets his fictional characters do the talking and the most obvious problem here is that Nicholson rarely plays sympathetic characters. When the Joker asks me "Who do you trust?" and Col. Jessop from A Few Good Men tells me how military leadership should work, I don't feel benevolent towards their recommendation. Then there's the appalling moment when we return to Jessop to hear him talk about the sexiness of a woman in power. Is speaking through the mouths of liars, murderers, and psychopaths the best strategy to forward an endorsement?

Are these the cultural icons one wants associated with one's campaign?

At least, to follow up on Tim's post about the Devil and Hillary Clinton, we have no Witches of Eastwick

“I don’t give a damn about Paris Hilton”

Jillian Sayre — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:02:23 +0000

Jezebel picked up on a story in the Washington Post and the The Daily Telegraph about the surprising shared cameraman (Nick Ut) behind the following well-known photographs:

Apparently bloggers had a lot to say about the coincidence and the Post does an interesting analysis of comparative wartime photography. Jezebel focuses on Ut's personal involvement with the subject: "When I look at my photograph of Kim and my photograph of Paris Hilton," he says, "I think they are both good pictures, in their way. I suppose the big difference is that I grew to love Kim, whereas... well, frankly, I don't give a damn about Paris Hilton." Turns out Nick Ut put down his camera, got Kim to a hospital and is credited with saving her life. This is an interesting issue with humanitarian rhetoric and the responsibilities of an author, brought to light by feelings of guilt expressed by photographers of trauma, as in the suicide of Kevin Carter

The Post talks about the pain in both pictures and the evocative potential of the pictures is captured in the photographer's reaction/non-reaction to the subject. The point is that we aren't supposed to give a damn about Paris Hilton and her ilk. They are creations of the narrative impulse itself, they exist because of the camera. In the 1972 photograph, the subject exceeds the frame of the photograph; her scream, her pain is a narrative excess that effects a call, a response-ability inherent to the work of witnessing.