Of Photography ...

The iconic photographs of a naked and very pregnant Demi Moore, of a powerful Margaret Thatcher, who stands firm in her own shadows, and of firefighters at the scene of the Twin Towers’ collapse after the attack, are familiar to the public consciousness. Image like the above and hundreds of others have circulated in the mainstream and the everyday through Vanity Fair: an American magazine of fashion, culture and politics. Even though the magazine has published critical articles on both politics and culture, it is mostly known for its close relationship to Hollywood, that even though highly ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ remains mostly ‘spectacular.’ Thus, these photographs stand in our consciousness as posters for decorating the walls of our houses, the room of the undergrad student or a kid’s paper collage. They are pictures easily reprinted, easily accessed, easily remembered, and rarely thought of as art – at least in the traditional sense. The implications in understanding fashion photography or photojournalism through the exhibition of such photographs (currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery) are enormous. I walked among dozens of others in the already cramped space of the gallery and even though forced to move linearly from the one photograph to the next (both due to the crowd and to the museum display) I was much enjoying the photographs of famous people (Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Madonna). It took me some time to realize that I had no clue who took these pictures, so I forced my self to walk back to the beginning and pay attention to the images again as well as to the artists who took them. I soon realized that the reason for not paying attention to the artists was simply the lack of information. Apart from a name and a couple of bio references (that if we wish to be honest seemed irrelevant), the artists got lost in the pictures and the crowd of visitors. I stood in the middle of the gallery space and looked around. This looked as commercial as the magazine from which the pictures come from. An apothecary of famous faces, celebrities of the twentieth and twenty-first century, that stare at you in their freeze moments. Maybe it is ok that the exhibition does not talk about photography per se. After all, what a better way to talk about photography than to illustrate the commodification of individuals as disposable celebrity subjects, thus subjects of admiration and desire, ready for our consumption.