LAS INFLUENCIAS EN EL PENSAMIENTO BERGERIANO

One of the key elements in making staged celebrity prominent in society was the invention of photography. The public image is logically crucial in the elevation and dissemination of the public face. Because the photograph is so ubiquitous in contemporary culture, it is easy to forget that its inven-tion is not even 200 years old. In 1839 Louis Daguerre first exhibited to the French Academy the photographic process that he and J. N. Niepce had recently developed. In England William Henry Fox Talbot had been attempting to capture images on light-sensitive paper. By 1835 he had succeeded with this process by using gallic acid to develop paper ‘nega-tives’ that were made translucent by waxing and used to make prints. The essentials for the photographic revolution of culture were in place.

By the mid-1840s daguerreotype galleries were founded in Paris, London and New York. The versatility of photography as a conduit of news was richly demonstrated by Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War (1854–6) and Matthew Brady’s of the American Civil War (1861–5). But in addition, photographic portraiture offered new opportunities for stag-ing celebrity. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, or Nadar as he was known after 1849, argued that his photographs enabled the spectator to apprehend the habits, ideas, character and very essence of his subjects. His portraits of distinguished contemporaries, such as Daumier, Monet, Millet, Corot, Doré, Guys and Baudelaire, established the nineteenth-century template for portraying celebrities to the public. Photography rapidly eclipsed portraits in miniature as offering the best likeness of a subject.

In 1849 James Polk was the first incumbent American President to be photographed. Yet it was Lincoln again who exploited the technology to imprint his own image of solemnity, concentration and grandeur on the American imagination. He deliberately used photography to establish his presence as the personification of the nation. ‘President Lincoln’, declared Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘is the essential representative of Yankees, and the

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veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems determined to regard as our characteristic qualities’.⁷Similar claims had been made on behalf of Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, but by Lincoln’s day photogra-phy’s technical improvements and declining cost offered unprecedented opportunities for breaking with the past by presenting what was generally perceived to be a truer, more intimate likeness. In 1854 the carte-de-visite, which consisted of a miniature portrait and signature, was introduced by André Disderi in France. Lincoln partly attributed his election victory in 1861 to the carte-de-visite made of him for the campaign by Matthew Brady.

Disderi’s camera took ten photographs on a single glass plate, thereby offering the public affordable, mass-produced photographic keepsakes. As early as the 1860s, cartes of distinguished celebrities such as Queen Victoria, Longfellow and Ulysses Grant were avidly collected by fans.

Nadar was an early convert. He rapidly developed a lucrative sideline to his prestige portraiture business. The cartes craze lasted well into the twentieth century, by which time it had become so extensive that cards showing famous sportsmen and women, actors and actresses were included free in cigarette packets.

Cartes certainly increased the prominence of celebrity culture by making celebrities more accessible to the public through photographic images. By becoming universally visible, the forms and varieties of celebrity culture became more pronounced in popular culture. However, it would be a mistake to suppose that photography simply had an edifying and improving effect. The carte-de-visite photograph was suitable for the circulation of pornographic pictures. As early as 1850 a law was passed in France outlawing the exhibition of obscene photographs in public places and making possession of negatives punishable by a prison sentence. Once again one is struck by celebrity culture’s fascination with the mutation, repression and transgression of social form. The individual men and women photographed in the pornographic cartes were always anonymous, but their illegal pictorial proliferation after 1850 is testimony to the

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strength of interest in the allure of illegal, underground and immoral cultures. The same processes that led reformers like Samuel Smiles to bend society into a rational, uplifting shape organized around achieved celebrity worked to make notorieties of figures from the marginal and repressed regions of culture.

Police mug-shots of violent criminals are an example of this process.

The intention behind them was to improve the surveillance, monitoring and control of the population. But by publicizing the physical identity of notorious figures who lived outside the law they also glamourized and mythologized them. By the 1930s the gangster Al Capone had become the civic landmark of Chicago, fêted by actors, scriptwriters and media moguls, and was frequently cheered by the public when he appeared at sports stadiums, restaurants and other public places. What the crowds responded to was partly Capone’s power. By the late 1920s he controlled prostitution, gambling and bootlegging in Chicago’s South Side and threat-ened to encroach on rival gangland territory on the North Side. Capone’s gang was woven into the fabric of everyday life for half the city’s popula-tion. But fear was only part of the key to his celebrity. By supplying illegal liquor and drugs to the Depression-hit population, he acquired gratitude, respect and a sort of murky popularity. Capone was no Robin Hood, but he did supply the poor with narcotic pleasures that the state had taken away.

So in a concrete way he was regarded as a positive force in the eyes of many in America. His celebrity may have been seriously flawed, but it contributed colour and zest to a population burdened by prohibition and economic hardship. The St Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 was Capone’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate George ‘Bugsy’ Moran, who controlled the North Side gang. Seven of Moran’s henchmen were slaughtered and the killings made global news, further elevating Capone’s celebrity as a man who was beyond the law. Capone was the inspiration for several Hollywood mob films in the 1930s and ’40s, most notably Little Caesar (1930), Scarface (1932) and The Gangster (1947). In making Capone, Charley (Lucky)

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Luciano, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Joey Adonis, Dutch Schultz and other criminals visible, photography and film produced the means for not only identifying gangsters, but also romanti-cizing them as popular bandits.

Photography, then, furnished celebrity culture with powerful new ways of staging and extending celebrity. It introduced a new and expand-ing medium of representation that swiftly displaced printed text as the primary means of communicating celebrity. Photographs made fame instant and ubiquitous in ways that the printed word could not match.

Oscar Wilde’s tour of the United States in 1882, in which Wilde regaled American audiences with his lectures on the new Aesthetic Movement in London, was a sensational triumph. Arguably, its popularity owed less to the quality of Wilde’s musings on the glory of Hellenic art and culture and the wisdom of Walter Pater and John Ruskin on beauty, and rather more to the staged photographs of him taken by Napoléon Sarony in New York.

These extraordinary representations of the young aesthete presented Wilde as an exotic Adonis, and were used to advertise his lectures through-out the USA.

Similarly, the spectacular success of Ernest Hemingway in the late 1920s and ’30s was partly due to the glamorous sequence of photographs taken of him by Helen Breaker in 1928. Her photographs made Hemingway look like a film star, and greatly increased the appeal of his fiction to book clubs, newspaper syndicates and Broadway and Holly-wood. Another example is Harold Harma’s suggestive photograph of Truman Capote on the dust-jacket of Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). This displayed the fully clothed author reclining on a well-upholstered chair with his hand languidly resting on his nether regions, which caused as much media comment as his prose. A number of magazines and papers reprinted it alongside the reviews, and the publisher, Random House, used it in ads – ‘This is Truman Capote’ – and produced blow-ups for shop display.

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The persona of the author was doubtless always an object of fascina-tion for readers. Nineteenth-century literary giants, such as Baudelaire, George Sand, Dickens, Walt Whitman, Tennyson and Longfellow, all sat for photographic portraits, and their publishers used them to publicize their works. But by the 1920s and ’30s publishing companies were publiciz-ing writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hempubliciz-ingway and Evelyn Waugh as celebrity icons, whose appearance and style in personifying the Zeitgeist were of equivalent cultural significance to their fiction. Harold Harma’s insinuating photograph of Capote therefore developed a fairly well-worn precedent. Present-day authors such as Will Self, Jay McInerney, Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie and Bret Easton Ellis have extended the cult of personality, so that their public image arguably has more public recognition than their work.