Image Control by Patrick Nathan

Author:Patrick Nathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640094543
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Photography is a technology—which is to say, it’s not a weapon. It’s not, in a strict sense, Barthes’s “agent of death,” even if it does trade in images of death. Even if it does promise, in some way, to bring something of its subjects into a time they cannot follow. Photography is hardly the first technology to promise transcending the boundaries of one’s own life—of reaching beyond the “brief crack of light,” as Nabokov called it, “between two eternities of darkness”—and, of course, hardly the last. Yet there remains something about it that most of us, including those who surveil themselves with thousands of photographs every year, are unable to see.

In her essay “Kim Kardashian West Is the Outsider Artist America Deserves,” Laura Jean Moore describes how female self-portraiture “upends historical norms of female representation and power, and places the power of depiction squarely in the hands of the subject.” In assuming herself and her life as a subject, “Kardashian West is part of an established legacy of female artists and writers who have created art from the realm of the intensely personal and confessional.” Via Instagram, Kardashian West narrates her self in carefully selected images with total artistic agency. Her story is one of empowerment, beauty, and—strangely enough, via a distortion of the self—self-acceptance. (Naturally, she rarely mentions the immense, uncirculated stockpile of wealth and resources that enable such self-acceptance, nor how much capital and labor is expended by her and her employees to arrive at such selfies.)

Kardashian West’s photographic project seems an inversion of Cindy Sherman’s, who has long suppressed the personal and the confessional despite her physical body being the subject of almost all her work. In “A Piece of the Action: Images of ‘Woman’ in the Photography of Cindy Sherman,” Judith Williamson argues that Sherman adapts the traditional uses of women in art, journalism, and advertising as divining rods for dominant societal narratives: “An image of a woman’s face in tears will be used by a paper or a magazine to show by impression the tragedy of war, or the intensity of, say, a wedding. From the face we are supposed to read the emotions in the event.” In Sherman’s Film Stills project, Williamson says, “the very reference to film invites this interpretation. Film stills are by definition a moment in a narrative. In every still, the woman suggests something other than herself, she is never complete: a narrative has to be evoked.” Instead of highlighting how narrative can imbue a self with agency, Sherman’s oblique personae are deprived of agency. The women in her photographs are victims of narrative, used in someone else’s story.

In Fetishism and Curiosity, Laura Mulvey suggests that each of Sherman’s images is “a cutout, a tableau suggesting and denying the presence of a story . . . The Film Stills parody the stillness of the photograph and they ironically enact the poignancy of a ‘frozen moment.’ The women in the photographs are almost always in stasis, halted by something more than photography.

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