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Indepth Arts News:
"Fame After Photography"
1999-07-08 until 1999-10-05
Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
From July 8 to October 5, The Museum of Modern Art presents the first exhibition to
trace the changing relationship between photography and fame over the years since the
mediums invention in 1839. Fame After Photography tracks the history of photographic
images in popular culture, and demonstrates how the subjects, style, usage, meaning,
and influence of photographic images of the famous have evolved during the past 160
years.
The exhibitions dramatic presentation of a range of materials exemplifies how these
images have permeated our daily lives and collective memories, and illustrates how
fame, and our understanding of it, has been transformed by its photographic
representation.
The exhibition was conceived, in part, as a response to recent events involving
photography. The explosion of gossip columns, magazines, and tabloid television
programs covering the famous and the notorious has created new venues for celebrity
stories and slick photographs. After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the
backlash against the paparazzi implicated celebrity photography itself, without a
critical analysis of the connections between photography and fame, not to mention
subjects and audiences. Fame After Photography examines these issues, and shows how the
audience for images of the famous in Western culture has mushroomed from single viewers
to global communities, and how these photographic images have multiplied and become
unavoidable.
The Museum of Modern Art asked Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric, founders of the
New York cultural programming and publishing firm Lookout, to organize the exhibition.
Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, comments, The exhibition
probes one of the key ways that photography has ceaselessly transformed our lives, and
I am delighted by the imagination, wit, and scholarly range that Kismaric and Heiferman
have brought to the project. Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman say, Today, fame
cant exist without photography. In a culture that invests so much of its energy
creating, consuming and obsessing about photographic images, it seemed important to
step back and look at the power of fame and photography to better understand our
fascination with both.
The exhibition follows a chronological narrative, divided into four sections: The First
Photographs of the Famous, Fame in the Mass Media, A New Celebrity Culture, and Fame
for All.
The First Photographs of the Famous
Before photography, images of important people were minted on coins, memorialized in
public sculpture, or captured in unique works of art made for elite audiences. After
1839, the photographic medium quickly established itself as the best way to record the
accomplishments and to spread images of important men and women. The first segment of
the exhibition, treating the period from the 1860s to 1900, surveys the earliest
photographic records of the famous.
The first stiffly posed daguerreotypes were unique and fragile objects, meant to be
handled carefully and treasured. Examples on display depict the author Edgar Allen Poe,
the statesman Daniel Webster, and the performer and courtesan Lola Montez.
When cartes-de-visite, inexpensive paper prints glued to 2 x 3-inch cards, triggered a
worldwide collecting trend in the 1860s, photographic portraits of the famous could,
for the first time, be owned by those outside the celebritys inner circle. The cartes
appealed to a growing urban middle class interested in collecting images and
fantasizing about social mobility. With the mass distribution of cartes-de-visite, the
process of photography became more public, and seemingly more democratic. More than 100
of these visual calling cards, displayed in a cabinet specially built for the
exhibition, show the eras most renowned scientists, musicians, authors, explorers, and
royals, notably a portrait of the attractive young mother Alexandra, Princess of
Wales--the Princess Diana of her day--whose carte sold 300,000 copies.
As the novelty of the tiny cartes-de-visite began to wear off in the 1870s, cabinet
cards, larger format prints glued to decorative boards, were introduced. In an unusual
work devoted to P. T. Barnum, a dramatic engraving which shows the burning of The
American Museum,
a tourist attraction Barnum founded, is surrounded by cabinet cards featuring the
eccentric and flamboyant performers the museum was noted for presenting.
Stereo cards, pairs of photographs that produced a three-dimensional effect when looked
at through a viewer, were widely distributed and collected from the 1860s through the
early twentieth century. The cards, when inserted in a stereo viewer, offered the
nineteenth-century public its first three-dimensional views of Buffalo Bill, Theodore
Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Mark Twain, among others.
Fame in the Mass Media
The invention of moving images in 1895 and progress in the halftone printing process
after the 1880s, followed by the rise of advertising and public relations agencies in
the 1920s and 1930s, radically transformed the distribution and content of photographic
images in the early part of the twentieth century. The penchant for collecting
photographic images of the famous--to be displayed on a shelf or pasted into an
album--quickly evolved into the consumption of these images, in ever greater quantities
and frequency, that were meant to be discarded after they were viewed. Early motion
pictures, tabloid newspapers, and magazines--reliant on photographic images to attract
buyers--became powerful vehicles for photography. The new media brought images of fame
to a mass audience at an accelerated pace and created intimacy between subjects and
audiences.
The introduction of the newsreel at the turn of the century added the expressive power
of motion to the photographic image. The famous were now seen in action--flexing,
strutting, dancing, and shooting, as in the exhibitions presentation of Annie Oakley
firing at targets, photographed by Thomas Edison at his studio in West Orange, New
Jersey, in 1894. Footage of Charles Lindbergh receiving a heros welcome in France
after crossing the Atlantic (1927) and film showing mourners at Rudolph Valentinos
funeral (1926) are among the nonfiction films and newsreels on view.
Following World War I, advances in halftone printing encouraged the spread of tabloid
journalism worldwide. Urban newspapers featured frequently sensational photographs of a
new and electric mix of folk heroes: sports and Broadway stars, criminals, politicians,
debutantes, and ordinary people elevated to stardom by lifes lucky breaks or
tragedies. Samples from New Yorks fabled tabloids of the 1920s and 1930s--New York
Daily News and the Daily Mirror--are displayed.
Not long after, the Golden Age of the Hollywood movie studios saw the rise of the first
industry based on the manufacturing and selling of the glamorous dream of fame as a way
of life. In movie palaces across the nation, striking cinematography and
larger-than-life close-ups elevated screen performers into gods and goddesses. Outside
the theater, the movies and their stars were marketed via a vast and effective
promotional apparatus. Material on view includes glamour shots by photographers such as
Bernard of Hollywood and traces how these images were used in fan magazines and
merchandise, for example, reproduced on the lids of Dixie Cup ice cream containers. The
care the studios took in creating these publicity images is evident in their meticulous
styling, lighting, and retouching, represented in the exhibition by side-by-side
displays of retouched vs. unretouched photographs of stars. A selection of trailers are
screened, featuring Greta Garbo as Camille and a parade of film stars in Babes on
Broadway (1942), as are lobby cards advertising films about historic figures, such as
Elisabeth of Essex, Alfred Dreyfus, and Enrico Caruso.
By the late 1920s, magazines were deploying photographic images to stimulate reader
loyalty and desire, creating a craving for more sophisticated and higher-quality images
of the famous. Magazine layouts from Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate how
the photographer Edward Steichen developed a streamlined photographic style while
shooting a heady mix of socialites and celebrities. The bold covers and picture story
spreads about the famous used by Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s were central to
that magazines success. The subjects of layouts presented include Adolf Hitlers
mistress Eva Braun, the opera singer Marian Anderson, the author Thomas Mann, and the
womens rights pioneer Margaret Sanger.
A New Celebrity Culture
After World War II, American culture shifted to the suburbs, and television--available
to anyone who could afford a set, and accessible at the push of a button--provided a
constant flow of celebrity images into Americas living rooms. The first issue of TV
Guide (1953) is presented, as are highlights of television programs from 1948 to 1960,
including the influential celebrity interview program Edward R. Murrows Person to
Person, and excerpts from This is Your Life, Queen for a Day, I Love Lucy, and the
Kennedy/Nixon Presidential debates.
The exhibition also examines the phenomenon of celebrity endorsements, popular with
companies eager to attract attention and increase sales of their products. On view are
magazine advertisements from the 1920s to 1960s, a group of Wheaties boxes featuring
photographs of athletes, a sumptuous color photograph featuring Claudette Colbert,
Fredric March, and Cecil B. DeMille on the set of Cleopatra (1935) enjoying Coca-Cola,
and fifteen mid-century celebrities drinking Rheingold Beer.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of rock and roll, the peace and womens
liberation movements, and strong anti-establishment sentiments encouraged new criteria
for fame and new models for images of the famous. Different types of
celebrities--political activists such as Jerry Rubin, feminists Gloria Steinem and
Betty Friedan, and counterculture figures such as Allen Ginsberg--entered the public
consciousness. The narcissism that characterized the me decade of the 1970s, buoyed
by the publics fascination with the growth of a new celebrity culture, was responsible
for the immediate success of People magazine, a spin-off from Times most-read section.
Launched in 1974, Peoples mission was to publish features on the lives of well-known
and ordinary people, side by side. The distinction that had once separated fame from
celebrity, leaders from followers, and stars from their audiences further eroded.
This transition was turned into art in the work and person of Andy Warhol. Warhols
obsessions with fame and celebrity are represented by a selection of rarely seen screen
tests of the rocker Lou Reed, the writer Susan Sontag, the model Naomi Sims, and the
cult figure Edie Sedgwick, and in the twenty-eight studio Polaroid portraits made in
the 1970s portraying politicians, musicians, and actors. Interview magazine--the
influential celebrity magazine Warhol founded--is exhibited, along with his screenprint
depicting Jacqueline Kennedy before and after the assassination of the President,
Jackie III from the portfolio 11 Pop Artists (1966).
Fame for All
In the past two decades, photographic images of recognizable faces have become icons
and commodities. Images of fame are business tools used by anyone with a product,
service, or political agenda to promote--from chefs and florists, to artists and
authors, and to diplomats and presidents.
The exhibition explores self-created fame, now possible for the first time on the
Internet. Jennicam.org, a Web site created by a college student who transmits video
images from her home, is shown, along with sites by celebrities such as supermodel
Cindy Crawford and actor Kelsey Grammer. A video depicts Tinseltown, a theme restaurant
in Anaheim, California, where customers pay to be treated like movie stars, surrounded
by actors impersonating fans, reporters, and paparazzi. A selection from Donald Trumps
personal collection of photographs shows the tycoon with famous people, including the
actor Sylvester Stallone, the television hostess Kathie Lee Gifford, and the
saxophonist Kenny G.
There is also a display of work by contemporary artists who are responding to the
prevalence and power of images of fame in our culture, including work by Cindy Sherman,
Richard Prince, Larry Johnson, David Robbins, Karen Kilimnick, and Yasumasa Morimura.>Some 600 original photographic artifacts are displayed in an unconventional multimedia
installation. Newsreels and movie trailers are video-projected onto eight-foot screens,
television programs are shown on monitors in three locations throughout the exhibition,
and an installation of three computer workstations demonstrates how the representation
of fame is evolving on the Internet. These moving pictures are juxtaposed with still
images in many forms: nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, cartes-de-visite, and stereo
and cabinet cards, along with twentieth-century tabloid newspapers, illustrated
magazines, advertisements, and consumer products, such as an Elvis Presley umbrella,
Marilyn Merlot wine, and collections of baseball cards, 45 rpm record covers,
postcards, and stamps.
The exhibition was conceived, in part, as a response to recent events involving
photography. The explosion of gossip columns, magazines, and tabloid television
programs covering the famous and the notorious has created new venues for celebrity
stories and slick photographs. After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the
backlash against the paparazzi implicated celebrity photography itself, without a
critical analysis of the connections between photography and fame, not to mention
subjects and audiences. Fame After Photography examines these issues, and shows how the
audience for images of the famous in Western culture has mushroomed from single viewers
to global communities, and how these photographic images have multiplied and become
unavoidable.
The Museum of Modern Art asked Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric, founders of the
New York cultural programming and publishing firm Lookout, to organize the exhibition.
Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, comments, The exhibition
probes one of the key ways that photography has ceaselessly transformed our lives, and
I am delighted by the imagination, wit, and scholarly range that Kismaric and Heiferman
have brought to the project. Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman say, Today, fame
cant exist without photography. In a culture that invests so much of its energy
creating, consuming and obsessing about photographic images, it seemed important to
step back and look at the power of fame and photography to better understand our
fascination with both.
The exhibition follows a chronological narrative, divided into four sections: The First
Photographs of the Famous, Fame in the Mass Media, A New Celebrity Culture, and Fame
for All.
The First Photographs of the Famous
Before photography, images of important people were minted on coins, memorialized in
public sculpture, or captured in unique works of art made for elite audiences. After
1839, the photographic medium quickly established itself as the best way to record the
accomplishments and to spread images of important men and women. The first segment of
the exhibition, treating the period from the 1860s to 1900, surveys the earliest
photographic records of the famous.
The first stiffly posed daguerreotypes were unique and fragile objects, meant to be
handled carefully and treasured. Examples on display depict the author Edgar Allen Poe,
the statesman Daniel Webster, and the performer and courtesan Lola Montez.
When cartes-de-visite, inexpensive paper prints glued to 2 x 3-inch cards, triggered a
worldwide collecting trend in the 1860s, photographic portraits of the famous could,
for the first time, be owned by those outside the celebritys inner circle. The cartes
appealed to a growing urban middle class interested in collecting images and
fantasizing about social mobility. With the mass distribution of cartes-de-visite, the
process of photography became more public, and seemingly more democratic. More than 100
of these visual calling cards, displayed in a cabinet specially built for the
exhibition, show the eras most renowned scientists, musicians, authors, explorers, and
royals, notably a portrait of the attractive young mother Alexandra, Princess of
Wales--the Princess Diana of her day--whose carte sold 300,000 copies.
As the novelty of the tiny cartes-de-visite began to wear off in the 1870s, cabinet
cards, larger format prints glued to decorative boards, were introduced. In an unusual
work devoted to P. T. Barnum, a dramatic engraving which shows the burning of The
American Museum,
a tourist attraction Barnum founded, is surrounded by cabinet cards featuring the
eccentric and flamboyant performers the museum was noted for presenting.
Stereo cards, pairs of photographs that produced a three-dimensional effect when looked
at through a viewer, were widely distributed and collected from the 1860s through the
early twentieth century. The cards, when inserted in a stereo viewer, offered the
nineteenth-century public its first three-dimensional views of Buffalo Bill, Theodore
Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Mark Twain, among others.
Fame in the Mass Media
The invention of moving images in 1895 and progress in the halftone printing process
after the 1880s, followed by the rise of advertising and public relations agencies in
the 1920s and 1930s, radically transformed the distribution and content of photographic
images in the early part of the twentieth century. The penchant for collecting
photographic images of the famous--to be displayed on a shelf or pasted into an
album--quickly evolved into the consumption of these images, in ever greater quantities
and frequency, that were meant to be discarded after they were viewed. Early motion
pictures, tabloid newspapers, and magazines--reliant on photographic images to attract
buyers--became powerful vehicles for photography. The new media brought images of fame
to a mass audience at an accelerated pace and created intimacy between subjects and
audiences.
The introduction of the newsreel at the turn of the century added the expressive power
of motion to the photographic image. The famous were now seen in action--flexing,
strutting, dancing, and shooting, as in the exhibitions presentation of Annie Oakley
firing at targets, photographed by Thomas Edison at his studio in West Orange, New
Jersey, in 1894. Footage of Charles Lindbergh receiving a heros welcome in France
after crossing the Atlantic (1927) and film showing mourners at Rudolph Valentinos
funeral (1926) are among the nonfiction films and newsreels on view.
Following World War I, advances in halftone printing encouraged the spread of tabloid
journalism worldwide. Urban newspapers featured frequently sensational photographs of a
new and electric mix of folk heroes: sports and Broadway stars, criminals, politicians,
debutantes, and ordinary people elevated to stardom by lifes lucky breaks or
tragedies. Samples from New Yorks fabled tabloids of the 1920s and 1930s--New York
Daily News and the Daily Mirror--are displayed.
Not long after, the Golden Age of the Hollywood movie studios saw the rise of the first
industry based on the manufacturing and selling of the glamorous dream of fame as a way
of life. In movie palaces across the nation, striking cinematography and
larger-than-life close-ups elevated screen performers into gods and goddesses. Outside
the theater, the movies and their stars were marketed via a vast and effective
promotional apparatus. Material on view includes glamour shots by photographers such as
Bernard of Hollywood and traces how these images were used in fan magazines and
merchandise, for example, reproduced on the lids of Dixie Cup ice cream containers. The
care the studios took in creating these publicity images is evident in their meticulous
styling, lighting, and retouching, represented in the exhibition by side-by-side
displays of retouched vs. unretouched photographs of stars. A selection of trailers are
screened, featuring Greta Garbo as Camille and a parade of film stars in Babes on
Broadway (1942), as are lobby cards advertising films about historic figures, such as
Elisabeth of Essex, Alfred Dreyfus, and Enrico Caruso.
By the late 1920s, magazines were deploying photographic images to stimulate reader
loyalty and desire, creating a craving for more sophisticated and higher-quality images
of the famous. Magazine layouts from Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate how
the photographer Edward Steichen developed a streamlined photographic style while
shooting a heady mix of socialites and celebrities. The bold covers and picture story
spreads about the famous used by Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s were central to
that magazines success. The subjects of layouts presented include Adolf Hitlers
mistress Eva Braun, the opera singer Marian Anderson, the author Thomas Mann, and the
womens rights pioneer Margaret Sanger.
A New Celebrity Culture
After World War II, American culture shifted to the suburbs, and television--available
to anyone who could afford a set, and accessible at the push of a button--provided a
constant flow of celebrity images into Americas living rooms. The first issue of TV
Guide (1953) is presented, as are highlights of television programs from 1948 to 1960,
including the influential celebrity interview program Edward R. Murrows Person to
Person, and excerpts from This is Your Life, Queen for a Day, I Love Lucy, and the
Kennedy/Nixon Presidential debates.
The exhibition also examines the phenomenon of celebrity endorsements, popular with
companies eager to attract attention and increase sales of their products. On view are
magazine advertisements from the 1920s to 1960s, a group of Wheaties boxes featuring
photographs of athletes, a sumptuous color photograph featuring Claudette Colbert,
Fredric March, and Cecil B. DeMille on the set of Cleopatra (1935) enjoying Coca-Cola,
and fifteen mid-century celebrities drinking Rheingold Beer.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of rock and roll, the peace and womens
liberation movements, and strong anti-establishment sentiments encouraged new criteria
for fame and new models for images of the famous. Different types of
celebrities--political activists such as Jerry Rubin, feminists Gloria Steinem and
Betty Friedan, and counterculture figures such as Allen Ginsberg--entered the public
consciousness. The narcissism that characterized the me decade of the 1970s, buoyed
by the publics fascination with the growth of a new celebrity culture, was responsible
for the immediate success of People magazine, a spin-off from Times most-read section.
Launched in 1974, Peoples mission was to publish features on the lives of well-known
and ordinary people, side by side. The distinction that had once separated fame from
celebrity, leaders from followers, and stars from their audiences further eroded.
This transition was turned into art in the work and person of Andy Warhol. Warhols
obsessions with fame and celebrity are represented by a selection of rarely seen screen
tests of the rocker Lou Reed, the writer Susan Sontag, the model Naomi Sims, and the
cult figure Edie Sedgwick, and in the twenty-eight studio Polaroid portraits made in
the 1970s portraying politicians, musicians, and actors. Interview magazine--the
influential celebrity magazine Warhol founded--is exhibited, along with his screenprint
depicting Jacqueline Kennedy before and after the assassination of the President,
Jackie III from the portfolio 11 Pop Artists (1966).
Fame for All
In the past two decades, photographic images of recognizable faces have become icons
and commodities. Images of fame are business tools used by anyone with a product,
service, or political agenda to promote--from chefs and florists, to artists and
authors, and to diplomats and presidents.
The exhibition explores self-created fame, now possible for the first time on the
Internet. Jennicam.org, a Web site created by a college student who transmits video
images from her home, is shown, along with sites by celebrities such as supermodel
Cindy Crawford and actor Kelsey Grammer. A video depicts Tinseltown, a theme restaurant
in Anaheim, California, where customers pay to be treated like movie stars, surrounded
by actors impersonating fans, reporters, and paparazzi. A selection from Donald Trumps
personal collection of photographs shows the tycoon with famous people, including the
actor Sylvester Stallone, the television hostess Kathie Lee Gifford, and the
saxophonist Kenny G.
There is also a display of work by contemporary artists who are responding to the
prevalence and power of images of fame in our culture, including work by Cindy Sherman,
Richard Prince, Larry Johnson, David Robbins, Karen Kilimnick, and Yasumasa Morimura.
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