JACQUELINE
Ron Galella, Jacqueline (New York, Sheed And Ward, 1974), 200 pages, 290 black-and-white photographs.
For the most part, the photojournalist is an anonymous function, a mere agent in a corporate representational enterprise. Our conviction that the news is fact depends on the seamless and transparent character of the medium, on the illusion that we are contemplating the product of an unbiased and uniform professionalism. Recently, however, a space has been cleared in the information industry for a kind of ritual celebration of the “creativity” of the photojournalist. Just as the television newscaster has evolved from an authoritative institutional voice into a mannered pseudo-independent performer, the photojournalist is being represented as the mythic embodiment of the humanism and daring of the bourgeois news media. And perhaps because it is celebrated as such, reporting itself becomes an increasingly mannerist endeavor. Producing an artist figure in this context can be likened to pulling a rabbit out of a top hat. In its initial incarnation, the news photograph is an anonymously rendered topic report, anchored to a specific moment and place in history. Resurrected as high art, the photo is a highly valued moment in a “career.” In the first instance, the representation appears to be unmediated by individual consciousness; in the second, the world is filtered through a persona, mediated by an exemplary witness. Thus, the same photograph is invested with covert autobiographical significance. Artistic “success” for the photojournalist could be said, somewhat facetiously, to involve having one’s work consistently read as self-portraiture.
Ron Galella was a hack photographer until adversity provided him with both the need and the opportunity to invent himself as a celebrity. His book, far from being a romantic offering to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is, in fact, a piece of aggressive self-justification. Galella’s individual photographs, in themselves, are hardly the issue; they are sloppy, unremarkable images with the grainy, unfocused look of the combat photograph or the police surveillance snapshot. At times, Galella photographs Jacqueline as though she were a fugitive heiress, caught in the act by an automatic holdup camera. Most of the images are cliched. An occasional photograph stands out, suggesting a quirky low-level scandal: Aristotle Onassis glowers into the camera, his outstretched arm dangling a two-dollar tip in front of a quizzical looking chauffeur. A Greek painter named Skalido poses with a horrendous driftwood painting, “similar to one bought by Jackie for her New York apartment.” But I am suggesting that we regard these photographs as elements within larger conceptual images, images of social relations. Galella’s photographs, both in the fan magazines and in Jacqueline, are implicated in the construction of public myth. The question here is one of theatricalized social role, of a sustained social interaction between Galella, as photographer, and Jacqueline, as celebrity. But Galella fills the role of photographer in a loose and nervous way; he is given to garrulous self-justification, as though he felt incapable of standing on his work alone. Galella’s personal art is fundamentally narrative, and every one of his photographs is subordinated to the logic of literary invention. He can be thought of as a naive Conceptual artist, as an autobiographical photonovelist of sorts. His narrative, both cunning and filled with self-mystification, speaks of a need to explain himself to a skeptical audience. Galella is unsure of his place in history.
Galella’s compulsion to legitimize himself publicly is understandable only if we consider the politics of his career. Working as a freelance photographer and selling the bulk of one’s pictures to magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen is probably a bit like owning a fast-food franchise: the terms of production are dictated from above, undermining any illusion of real economic or esthetic autonomy. (Both the hamburger and the scandal industries understand and exploit the symbolic value of the cliché.) The photographer, in this context, provides an “open” photograph that is used in a rather vague and sloppy way to validate any one of a multitude of rumors. The documentary function of the image is often so imprecisely defined that the same photograph could be used to corroborate contradictory propositions. At random. I pulled a copy of Photoplay, March, 1972, out of a pile in a Chelsea used-magazine store catering to film fetishists. The cover story promotes another sordid domestic crisis, more ruling-class dirt:
SERVANT TALKS!
THE NIGHT ARI WARNED JACKIE:
“I’M LEAVING YOU!”
HOW SHE GOT HIM TO TAKE HER BACK.
I recognize most of the photos accompanying the article as Galella’s. No credits are given. The text is typical fan-magazine stuff. Jacqueline, too much the haughty and withdrawn princess, is abandoned by Aristotle, whose peasant soul craves a more lively companion. After a period of isolation, Jacqueline mends her ways and is reunited with Aristotle. They party together in public.
The Jacqueline legend occupies a unique space in the pop culture pantheon. Her public imager is, in fact, a superimposition of images: glamorous haute bourgeoise, one of the Beautiful People, and tragic widow of a secular martyr. At any given journalistic moment, she may be marked as but one of the exemplary creatures within this manifold: as wife, as mother, as consumer, as face and body, as self-decorator, as widow, as lover, as patroness, as sportswoman, and so on. The all-encompassing logic is that of sex-role, a logic to which even her privilege is subject. Jacqueline is a “positive” female archetype; her failures are instructive. The fan magazine steers this persona through a variety of fictional crises, aiming at the melodramatic resolution of sex-political contradictions, all at the level of fantasy. In this imaginary Photoplay world, Jacqueline shares the “fate” of all women; her life is invested with a country-music pathos. An ideological bludgeon wielded at an audience of lower-class women, the fan magazine upholds the virtues of feminine passivity and submission, offering its readers covert instruction in the mechanics of living gracefully with male violence.
But rather than generalize, I’d like to take a closer look at the article mentioned above, in order to suggest how Galella’s photos function as “news” within the fan magazine. Facing the title page with its blaring announcement of near-divorce are two rather trivial looking color photos in sequence, almost certainly taken only seconds apart. We see Jacqueline from the same camera position in both frames, in flashlit medium shots. The camera was close enough to record gesture and facial expression and far enough away to provide some sense of place. Jacqueline is standing at a bar, framed in such a way that she appears to be alone. She is oblivious to the two persons behind her on the right; they, in turn, ignore her. And if anyone stands outside the frame on her left, she gives no sign, in these two instants, of acknowledging an unseen companion. She is wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy costume. Her hair is somewhat disheveled.
In the first of the two photographs, Jacqueline reaches for a drink, her right hand about to grasp the half-empty glass. Her glance is directed downward, as though she might be watching her hand as it closed around the drink. On the other hand, her eyes could be scanning the printed page of a magazine that lies on the bar, an inch or two away from the object of her grasp. But suppose we imagine that this “downward glance” is, in fact, an “inward glance,” suggesting introspection, withdrawal in a public space. Suppose we imagine that the “downward glance” is, in fact, a case of “heavy lidded eyes,” suggesting intoxication, and deliberate overattention to the act of steering the hand toward an ill-defined, unfocused target. The glint of the flash on Jacqueline’s makeup gives her face a taut and pallid look. Her features are either strained or slack, it’s impossible to tell. She looks depressed. She looks drunk. She’s both. She’s reading a magazine and offhandedly reaching for a drink, bathed for an instant in the unflattering light of the strobe.
The second photograph catches Jacqueline in an animated stance. She smiles and leans forward; her eyes, dilated and glistening in the strobelight, are wide with a look of eagerness or exuberance. A slight underexposure relative to the preceding frame has driven the pallor from her cheeks. Her drink is no emptier than it was. Her right hand, no longer grasping for the glass, rests on the bar in front of her in an indeterminately expressive gesture. Clearly, Jacqueline’s energies are directed outward, toward someone on the other side of the bar, outside the frame. Our only clue to the identity of this person is a man’s right forearm and hand, clothed in a garish yellow sleeve with a black cuff, holding a swizzle stick. She’s talking to the bartender.
Something is offered here beyond the spectacle of invaded celebrity privacy, beyond the cheap thrills of a false intimacy. At this “higher” level of meaning the photographs carry a transcendental significance, having been cut loose from the banalities of moment and place. The Photoplay reader is expected to fixate on these images not as documents of real events but as embodiments of a moral lesson. The photographs function covertly as iconic validations of a written testimonial in a manner stylistically marked as that of documentary. That is, the photographs by their look of innocence and candor confer upon the text an illusory truthfulness. At the same time, the paired snapshots concretize the alleged transformation of Jacqueline’s personality. The accompanying text begins:
If it weren’t so obvious and well documented, the stunning transformation of Jackie Onassis from a cold, haughty, withdrawn and unhappy woman into an outgoing, gutsy, adventurous, high-spirited creature, would be absolutely incredible.
Taken literally, with this statement as a pointer, the photographs become the conclusive documentation of a psychic reversal, a documentation achieved by a kind of “before and after” bracketing. Here is the psychic equivalent of the weight-loss miracle. (After all, the fan magazine is a re-engineering manual for female mind and body.) We are to believe that, within the span of a few seconds in a public bar, this celebrated woman reinvented herself in the face of her husband’s threats and a photographer’s flash. The decisive moment took place invisibly between the two exposures.
Even after suspending, out of charity, our insistence on the documentary integrity of these images, a nonspecific reference to a major shift in persona remains. Even this reading depends, of course, on our taking fleeting expression and gesture as weighty emblems of interior life. Thus, in the first photo Jacqueline broods, drink in hand. In the second, she embraces the world. (We ignore the fact that, of all the people she might be seen talking to, she’s been caught with the bartender.) In this moral tale, vivacity triumphs over brooding self-indulgence. Stripped of its specificity, Photoplay’s naive diptych functions allegorically in much the same way that O. G. Rejlander’s composite photograph The Two Ways of Life (1857) did, although the latter work presents a Victorian, bourgeois, and male-oriented dilemma, while the Jacqueline photos present a moral opposition that is modern, lower class, and directed at women. Here, virtue is associated with an ebullient but submissive glamour, and vice, or deviance, with the terrors of a lonely housewife’s alcoholism.
But where does the photographer stand in all this? Behind the bar, having slipped a bill into the same bartender’s hand? Surely we’ve been looking at an editor’s art, and not Galella’s. More evidence of editorial liberties: the same article includes another photograph that also appears in Jacqueline. Photoplay decided to run this shot of Jacqueline and Peter Duchin leaving a restaurant with Duchin cropped out of the frame. The headline over this alteration declares, “Days and Nights Alone.” This sort of thing is typical in fan-magazine photo fictions, but a more curious omission stands out: Galella’s are the only photographs to appear in this particular issue of Photoplay without credit. At the same time the article on Jacqueline mentions him obliquely:
Would you have believed . . . that the same Jackie would suddenly stop running and hiding from a photographer who dogged her steps, turn on him and file suit against him in open court?
Galella is allowed to figure incidentally, and in a negative way, in a narrative that depends on his doggedly obtained “evidence.” This issue of Photoplay appeared during the Onassis-Galella lawsuit hearings. The Magazine’s editor, Bernadette Carrozza, testified against Galella while continuing to run his photographs. Galella, understandably, felt betrayed. In his book, he aims a James McCordesque diatribe at Carrozza and Shana Alexander, the former editor of McCall’s, who referred to the photographer as a “piranha” on national radio and television. In this context, Galella sees himself being cast as the nameless functionary, left out in the cold by clean-faced superiors. He displays the economic and political resentment of the little man in the middle, the resentment of the shopkeeper, the cop, and the lower level bureaucrat:
So, if I’m a piranha fish, like Shana Alexander says, what are the people at McCall’s—sharks? They made a lot more money out of Jackie than I ever did. . . . okay to knock a paparazzo . . . but don’t knock any of the big fish in publishing. You might hurt your pretty reputation in the business and find yourself blackballed some day.
Galella is acutely aware of his own struggle for economic survival, and this consciousness informs every attempt he makes to narrate his own life. Consider, by way of contrast, a passing remark by photographer Irving Penn in his just released Worlds in a Small Room: “. . . our guide and advisor, would fulfill the social requirements of such a visit [to a New Guinea village], and arrange the payments that had to be made.” This is Penn’s only reference to the complex barter transactions that must have taken place between his party and the native peoples encountered on a Vogue portrait safari. Penn has the economic freedom and the discretion as an artist not to worry about or mention money. Galella, on the other hand, cannot escape the specter of the commodity; every image is previsualized in terms of its salability. He releases the shutter with the compulsive impatience of the slot machine artist. A photograph of Aristotle Onassis smoking a cigar translates into a cash prize from the Cigar Institute of America. Or, like a fashion-world bounty hunter, Galella waits for Jacqueline to appear in hot pants, banking on a reward from Women’s Wear Daily. He permutes couples with an eye toward the gossip potential of the suggested unions. Galella’s narrative yields an almost perfect example of the esthetic and economic predicament of the commercial artist and journalist. His self-justifications continually shift between two contradictory poles. One self-image is pragmatic: he’s just trying to make a buck in a hostile world. The other is idealized: he’s an artist, a born romantic, and a champion of the free press. In recounting his Bronx childhood, Galella distinguishes himself from other working-class sons of Italian immigrant parents:
But I was different from the others. I had a lot of imagination, and from the time I was very young my heroes were the great romantic stars of fiction, like D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers and Don Quixote and Cyrano de Bergerac. I was artistic. I think most people don’t use the creative talents they have . . . they would rather watch television.
More often than not, Galella’s ideal is the vindicated loser, the impulsive and foolish seeming fellow who triumphs over the scorn of others. But even in idealizing himself in terms of literary models, Galella cannot relinquish the vocabulary of the fan magazine, equating “star” and “hero.” He feels compelled to document his early career as an artist; Jacqueline includes a reproduction of a mess-hall mural he painted while serving in the Air Force and photographs of ceramic statues of his literary heroes. But it’s impossible to tell whether this is droll self-mockery or naive self-promotion—although it’s probably the latter. After all, Galella may imagine, without thinking about it too much, that the same people who read fan magazines are reading Jacqueline. Presenting himself to an imaginary audience of fans, people of his own social background, Galella need not feel at all distanced from his own life. For these readers, he allows himself to play Horatio Alger, proclaiming, for example, that “energy plus ideas equals success.”
Beneath all his rhetoric, Galella aspires to professional and esthetic legitimacy. He reverses the derogatory connotation of the label “paparazzo,” reinventing Fellini’s neologism in ideal terms. Against a United States District Judge’s official definition of paparazzi as “a kind of annoying insect . . . [who] make themselves as visible to the public and obnoxious to their subjects as possible to aid in the advertisement and wide sale of their works,” Galella poses the theory of the higher truth of the stolen image. This theory is implicit in the title “candid photography” and hinges on a fundamental distinction between nature and artifice, between the “real” and the assumed persona. The unguarded, and therefore less consciously theatrical, moment is thought to manifest more of the “inner being” of the subject than is the calculated Gestalt of immobilized gesture, expression, and stance. This is the fantasy of the totally transparent medium, of a documentary art liberated from the indeterminacy principle. The advice columns of popular photography magazines offer this formula endlessly, usually as a curative for the stilted look of the posed family snapshot, But with Galella the antagonism between nature and culture takes on political overtones. The image of a celebrity is an institutional edifice, maintained and protected by armies of press agents, makeup artists, and bodyguards. The paparazzo’s task is to penetrate that wall. He sees himself ideally as the antagonist and ethical better of the official portrait photographer, the court artist whose function is validation and promotion and whose life is, as a result, supposedly more comfortable than that of the freelancer.
Here we have to distinguish between two varieties of spectacle, one official and operatic, the other illicit, and tending toward the pornographic. The Academy Awards, Triumph of the Will, and state funerals are about ostentatious public affect. Hollywood scandals, Eva Braun’s home movies, and photographs of a nude Jacqueline Onassis, on the other hand, offer their audiences the voyeuristic thrill of violated upper-class privacy. (The ultimate paparazzo coup is to catch the stars fucking; but the elevation to stardom of the porn film performer accomplishes this in reverse. Galella, however, insists on self-censorship, on “tasteful” and “flattering” imagery.) The spectacle of daily life thrives on a kind of conceptual collage, in which the celebrated public figure is superimposed on the spaces of the mundane world, as in the photos of Jacqueline drinking. Galella presses his lens against a drugstore window in Peapack, New Jersey, catching Jacqueline “buying magazines and ice cream with real money, just like an ordinary American woman.” But, it’s rather foolish to argue that the fragment of the everyday yields a higher truth than does the controlled representation of upper-class glamour and privilege. Both images are biased by the framing discourse to deliver messages that are ideological, rather than ideally “true” or “false.” Furthermore, even casual street behavior is theatrical, particularly so with celebrities, who expect to be assaulted by photographers at any moment. Jacqueline testified in court that she manufactured a “Galella smile.” So much for candor.
The two most notable “candid” photographers are Erich Salomon and Weegee. Galella, without being terribly conscious of photographic history, owes something to both. He cannot help but derive his subject matter and his overall strategy from Salomon, who was the first photographer to engage in the systematic and unsolicited portrayal of the famous and powerful. But unlike Galella’s, Salomon’s career during the late ’20s and ’30s was a triumph of discretion and camouflage. He would stroll into European political banquets and receptions in white tie and tails and stand some distance from his concealed camera, releasing the shutter at the appropriate moment with a cable. An outsider of inferior social status, Salomon assumed the manner and style of his subjects. Weegee, on the other hand, had no assimilation problems during the journalistic period of his career. He was a low life among the lowly; his sensibilities are those of the lumpen hustler, the ambulance chaser, the aggressive practitioner who sticks to the streets. Working within his own milieu, Weegee was able to produce interesting and very quirky images of lower-class urban life. But as soon as he achieved some recognition from The Museum of Modern Art, he went slightly haywire, replacing his lens with a kaleidoscope and embarking on a cornball abstractionist path. (At the same time, he published a dedicatory photo of Edward Steichen with spittle running into his beard.) Galella shares Weegee’s aggressive tactics and his reactionary lower-class vision, but not his capacity for slander and self-mockery. Involved in a more spectacular and less legitimate journalism than Salomon’s, both these photographers have a taste for cheap theatrics and self-promotion. Perhaps Galella’s major talent lies in his systematic self-documentation. He photographs himself lurking in the bushes on Skorpios or tosses an extra camera to a companion while hustling down Fifth Avenue after Jacqueline. These photographs are the most revealing in the book; they offer the strongest clues to the photographer’s interactive style and public self-image. Galella attempts to situate himself within the spectacle, as a sort of luminous jet-set detective. Jacqueline is full of tips on the covert tactics of paparazzo photography: whom to trust, whom not to trust, whom to bribe, how to get cheap information out of Greek fishermen—in general, how to maneuver one’s way around the social barriers that stand between the rich and powerful and the uninvited cameras of the popular press. Galella promotes himself as a trespass artist. His photographs are marked, above all, as the outcomes of specific encounters; only a few images aspire to a transcendental glamour.
Here is the crux of the matter. For Galella, photojournalism is war, rooted in the social inequality of photographer and subject. And yet he both affirms and denies the social antagonism between himself and the stars. Both his affirmation and his denial have personal and ideal components. With Jacqueline he allows his war to masquerade as romance, somewhat half-heartedly assuming the stance of the jilted but devoted admirer. Galella is a failed infiltrator; his attempts at camouflage are so transparent that one suspects he prefers confrontation to being passed unrecognized:
A paparazzo needs a car. A couple of years ago I bought a $3,600 carousel-red Pontiac Firebird with spoke wheels and stereo am/fm radio. You don’t need a car as nice as that but it helps me look as though I belong. You fit right into the best parking lots with a car like that. The Secret Servicemen couldn’t believe it the first time they saw me drive up in that car.
Somehow, ostentatious upward mobility and subterfuge get confused. Galella’s resentment is tempered by envy and respect; he aspires to stardom himself. He continually compares his own social options to those of Jacqueline: she is protected by doormen in Manhattan, while he moves to Yonkers to avoid burglars; she parties, while he waits outside in the cold. Jacqueline publicly demeans him, testifying in court that he always “grunted” while photographing her. Accordingly, Galella’s narrative shifts between self-confident testimonials to his victory over an unprivileged background, and attempts to refute the charge that he lacks the manners and refinement appropriate to upper-class life. He is simultaneously aware and unaware of class boundaries.
Galella and his lawyers portray the Onassis court battle as an epic confrontation between the “individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to be informed.” In a sense, the trial recapitulates the historical antagonism between the liberal and the popular press and the sequestered economic elite. Here, Galella casts himself as the liberal defender of the little man. In one breath he accuses the Kennedy-appointed judge of prejudicial bias and Onassis of buying witnesses. With the next, his faith in democracy is restored:
I was flattered by the fact that here I was with Jackie as an equal for a change. I was a nobody and yet under the American system, I could bring this great woman into court, where she had to defend herself, just like any other citizen. And you know, it was the first time, the only time that Jackie ever referred to me as Mr. Galella.
Jacqueline was undoubtedly written in order to pay Galella’s court costs.
The last photograph in the book is a masterpiece of self-vindication. In the background, Galella lounges under the awning of La Côte Basque, legs crossed, hands in pockets, looking very dapper and nonchalant in a plaid jacket and striped tie. His camera and flash hang unused around his neck. Jacqueline, Aristotle, and another woman stand in the foreground, apparently waiting for a limousine. Another photographer, almost invisible in shadow, lurks directly behind Aristotle. All that can be discerned of the photographer in any detail is his hand on the shutter of his camera. Galella’s caption reads, “I don’t photograph Jackie anymore. I leave that now to other paparazzi.”
We tend to forget that the making of a human likeness on film is a political act. Galella may be an opportunist and a hustler, and he may take his fame any way he can get it. But his one virtue as an artist lies in the fact that what is hidden in most photographer’s work, the transaction that brought the image into the world, is painfully obvious in his.
—Allan Sekula
