The idea of using photography to disseminate images of famous men and women is as old as the medium itself. From the rise of the daguerreotype in the 1840s, astute photographers moved into this market, even if, as a non-reproducible unique image, the process had serious drawbacks. In the USA, however, the earliest large East Coast studios soon devised an appropriate strategy. Edward Anthony of New York created a ‘Daguerrian Gallery’ of Washington notables in the 1840s. Mathew Brady's 1850 Gallery of Illustrious Americans was a serial publication of lithographed portraits with biographical texts. Paper photography moved in the same direction: in Scotland, David O. Hill and Robert Adamson created an impressive portrait gallery of figures from Scottish ecclesiastical, artistic, and intellectual circles in the first half of the 1840s. At the beginning of the 1850s a celebrity like Victor Hugo was able to reckon future sales of his portrait as a significant financial resource.
The rise of wet-plate photography and the advent of the carte de visite gave renewed impetus to an already flourishing trade. The ‘portrait mania’ lampooned by humorists from the late 1850s had two aspects: having one's own portrait made, and collecting portraits of other people. Whether bought or exchanged, the pictures were usually collected in purpose-designed albums in which friends and relations rubbed shoulders with contemporary celebrities: monarchs, statesmen, actors, and artists. In the 1860s Empress Elizabeth of Austria was one of several royal personages to share the craze, collecting hundreds of celebrity portraits and instructing Austrian diplomats to find images of beautiful women.
From the mid-1850s onwards most of the large portrait studios entered the celebrity picture business. Every photographer had his speciality: Nadar, Parisian bohemians and the republican opposition; Disdéri, society and the demi-monde; Camille Silvy and Antoine Claudet, the British aristocracy and court; the American Napoleon Sarony, from 1866, the theatre world. Celebrity portraits became a vital part of studio publicity, displayed on interior walls and in showcases outside. In England it was not until 1860, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert endorsed the fashion by allowing the sale of royal portraits, that the new carte format really took off; between 1861 and 1867, c. 300-400 million were sold there every year. For, if the man in the street might buy a few dozen copies of his own image, a celebrity's could sell in tens or even hundreds of thousands. In December 1861, when Prince Albert died, 70, 000 portraits of him changed hands in a week. In 1867 the English photographer Downey claimed to have sold 300, 000 pictures of the popular princess of Wales. The numbers of such portraits registered under the Fine Art Copyright Act of 1862 underline the profitability of the trade. While an ordinary portrait cost a few shillings, that of a celebrity could fetch pounds.
The ‘contemporary gallery’ concept also boomed in the 1850s. In Munich, Alois Löcherer and Franz Hanfstaengl published albums of eminent contemporaries, from royalty to artists and scholars. In Paris, from 1853, Théophile Sylvestre issued an Histoire des artistes vivants comprising photographs accompanied by biographical notes. In 1860 Disdéri launched his Galerie des contemporains: for 2 francs a week, subscribers received a carte de visite of a celebrity plus a mini-biography; by 1862 more than 120 had appeared, most of those surviving being of actors and actresses. In St Petersburg, meanwhile, Sergei Levitsky and André Denier produced, respectively, albums of famous writers (1857) and of the Russian ruling elite (1865-6).
As competition intensified, each studio was obliged, funds permitting, to attract celebrities and, if possible, obtain exclusive rights to them. From the 1860s onwards, famous people often insisted on payment. Charles Dickens, for example, touring the USA in 1867, refused to sit for Jeremiah Gurney without a fee. The news caused a sensation among artists, who henceforth often demanded to share the proceeds of their portrait sales. The actress Sarah Bernhardt declared that one of the main reasons for her trip to New York in 1880 was to have herself photographed by Sarony. For the first sitting, he paid her $1, 500. Sarony soon became one of Bernhardt's principal photographers, and issued numerous portraits of her. She became one of the first great actresses to pay close attention to the dissemination of her photographic image, anticipating by decades the creation of the Garbo and Dietrich ‘myths’.
The advent of the dry-plate process did not fundamentally change these practices. Indeed, new formats (e.g. the postcard) and photomechanical printing processes accelerated their development. The increasing flexibility and portability of cameras also made it easier to go outside the studio. Henceforth, as in the turn-of-the-century series ‘Our Contemporaries at Home’ by the French firm of Dornac & Cie, eminent people could be photographed with greater immediacy in their own surroundings, whether offices, studios, laboratories, or homes. At the same time, pictorialism brought a resurgence of the artist-portrait, notable examples being the work of Coburn, Steichen, and Frank Eugene, specializing in European Symbolists.
From the early 20th century onwards, assisted by the spread of the half-tone process, the main vehicle of the photographic image was the periodical: weekly, monthly, black-and-white, then, gradually from the 1930s, in colour. It became a true mass medium and the principal transmission channel for portraits of celebrities who, since the rise of the cinema, had become stars. The inter-war period saw the proliferation of large-circulation popular papers whose front pages were largely taken up with celebrity scandals and human-interest stories. The creation of magazines specializing in social events, fashion, and entertainment— Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar—also influenced portraiture, and photographers such as Steichen, Beaton, and Hoyningen-Huene became celebrated for a highly staged and artificial style with affinities both to the 19th-century portrait studio and contemporary film-making, especially in Hollywood. In France, the Studio Harcourt practised a technique of carefully lit studio portraiture that transformed every sitter into a film star. In the USA, the same screen-influenced formula distinguished the work of men like Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885-1971), official photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies (and a pioneering user of colour), whose portraits, including those of many silent-era stars, presented the subject in a highly artificial and often erotically charged manner. As such portraitists also worked in fashion and advertising, they tended to be concerned as much with publicity as psychology.
In a different mode, in contrast to this elaborately controlled aesthetic, photojournalism offered a freer kind of image. One of its chief exponents in this period was Erich Salomon, who, using a small-format camera, captured more or less unawares a group of portraits of inter-war personalities remarkable for their intimacy; over 150 of them appeared in Berühmte Zeitgenossen in unbewachten Augenblicken (Famous Contemporaries in Unguarded Moments; 1931). After 1945 the race for fame, and efforts to push back the boundaries of privacy, intensified. A key development was the rise of the paparazzo: sleazy younger brother of the great photo-reporter (with whom, however, he shared the cult of the ‘decisive moment’), who fed on plundered images that broke the conventional accord between celebrity and photographer. Technical advances—flash, fast film, long lenses—spawned a genre of smash-and-grab photography that fed both the yellow and mainstream press. This tempted some celebrities to vary the game: in the 1960s, for example, Sophia Loren and arch-paparazzo Tazio Secchiaroli (1925-98) actually staged ‘stolen’ pictures.
From the 1960s, following the example of the press and radio, television seized on celebrities and their pictures. Artists, headed by Andy Warhol, recycled images of figures like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley in works that acknowledged the potency both of photography and of these modern icons. At the same time, following Warhol's dictum that everyone had the right to fifteen minutes of fame, the concept of celebrity widened. Proof of this in the USA was a 1970s creation like People magazine, based on the principle of placing stars and ordinary people—‘real folks caught up in the day's biggest news’—side by side. (However, the ultimate vehicle of ‘fame for everyone’ would be the Internet, the webcam, and the ‘live’ website.) Also from the 1970s, following the example of a few great post-war portraitists such as Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon, some photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts, set out to make star and celebrity portraiture the heart of their business, and adopted a range of approaches, from glamour to simplicity and directness. On another tack, finally, artists like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura appropriated the visual stereotypes of glamour and stardom in order to deconstruct and subvert them.
At the turn of the 21st century, photography remains central to celebrity culture. Photographers like the Peruvian-born Mario Testino (b. 1954), image maker by appointment to the rich and beautiful, are themselves celebrities. Legitimate, more or less controllable pictures are profitable for all concerned. In July 1999, for example, OK magazine paid the British footballer David Beckham and the singer Victoria Adams £1 million for their wedding photographs, and quadrupled its sales. But at the same time technology and mass demand have made the capture of illicit and intrusive celebrity pictures feasible and rewarding as never before. Despite events such as the death of Diana, princess of Wales (1997), and, partly as a consequence, a widespread ‘privacy backlash’, the incentive to obtain them by whatever means remains strong. The balance of advantage between photographer and celebrity continues to swing.
— Quentin Bajac
See also ethics and photography; law and photography.Bibliography
- Mormorio, D., Tazio Secchiaroli, Greatest of the Paparazzi, trans. A. Bonfante-Warren (1999).
- Hamilton, P., and Hargreaves, R., The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography (2001).
- Celebrity: The Photographs of Terry O'Neill, introd. A. A. Gill (2003).
- Kinmonth, P., Mario Testino: Portraits (2003)
