The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra is showing an exhibition of celebrity portraits from Vanity Fair magazine spanning the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s to the present. These portraits of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and his then wife Joan Crawford (top), Louise Brooks (middle) and Liza Minnelli (bottom) come from the exhibition. I saw the exhbition this week and it was quite a bit more interesting than the celebrity vanity piece I was expecting.
In reviewing this exhibition, Andrew Stephens of The Age suggests that Vanity Fair's appeal has lain in its promise to get "behind" the manufactured celebrity smiles to the "real" person underneath, which in this age of so-called "celebrity culture" where there is neither privacy nor mystery about any vaguely public figure is really no mean feat. I don't entirely agree that there is any real depth to these photos in terms of insight to the "real" celebrity: you are looking at highly posed, highly structured, highly controlled, generally contrived images of professionals whose job is to project an image taken by professionals whose job it is to capture glossy images of image professionals. In other words, there is no escaping the artifice of the subject or the situation. The photos do not give you any insights to who the "real person" may be beneath the air-brushed, posed image. And nor should they really - celebrities have a right to a public and a private persona, and why should we the masses have any right to see or even glimpse their private selves?
What the Vanity Fair "style" does seem to offer, however, more so than your standard celebrity mug shots, is a suggestion of intimacy and a highly polished presentation that makes the images at once engaging and interesting. All the famous images from the post-1983 incarnation of Vanity Fair are here: the iconic, celebrity-friendly images of Mario Testino, Herb Ritts, Annie Liebowitz, Bruce Weber and David Lachapelle. We have the dancing Nancy and Ronald Reagan, the smiling black and white grainy Princess Diana, Raquel Welch and the naked swimming team, Joan and Jackie Collins in sunglasses in the back of a limo, pregnant Demi Moore, all those "Hollywood" group tableaux.
Most interesting in my opinion were the photos from the earlier version of the magazine: the 1920s and '30s photos of not only movie stars but also writers (many of whom, like DH Lawrence, I had never even seen a photo of before), painters, dancers and other artists, suggesting the far broader palette of popular creative artists that existed in the earlier part of the last century compared to the movie star-obsessed focus of the early years of this century.
