Talking heads

What celebrity photographs tell us about the famous, the photographers, and us

(estate of yousuf karsh)

If you aspired to become photographer to the stars today, you'd be unlikely to follow the lead of Yousuf Karsh. Karsh, as the Museum of Fine Arts exhibit "Karsh 100: a Biography in Images" makes plain, is a dinosaur. Many of the legendary portrait photographer's images are wonderful. But there's no mistaking the fact that they belong to a distant era.

So what has changed? Is it celebrity? Is it photography? Or is it us?

Discussing the art of portrait photography in "The Mind's Eye," a book of his selected writings, the great Henri-Cartier Bresson talked about grasping "the interior silence of a willing victim." "It's very difficult," he wrote. "You must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin."

It's particularly hard if your subjects are famous, for even the skin of famous people is so routinely exposed that it tends to deflect us.

Karsh's own photographs remind us - potently at times - that a portrait needn't convey anything very concrete about a person to be arresting. It can emphasize instead the unknowability of other people, conveying a sense of bottomless depths and contradictions.

All that's fine. But today, we want more from celebrity photography. Indeed, that impulse - always more - is what defines our relationship to celebrity today. The results, when it comes to portraits of the famous, are not always as crass as they sound. It turns out that a lot of the time what we want more of is irony, mischief, and even a degree of skepticism about the celebrity culture we inhabit.

Karsh's approach was artful, but its artfulness was comparatively straightforward. Consider, for instance, how many of his subjects - evoking those bottomless depths - have their eyes closed, their faces lost in shadow, or how many are seen only in silhouette. The very first portrait in the exhibition shows the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius with his eyes shut. The second goes even further: It shows Spanish cellist Pablo Casals from behind, practicing his cello.

If the eyes are, as the cliché has it, windows onto the soul, Karsh's way was to picture his subjects with their eyes averted, the better to evoke their souls' impenetrable mysteries.

It's not that he was uninterested in capturing their interior lives. Quite the contrary. But he did it by defining "interior life" negatively. He let the shadows do all the work.

The Casals portrait - like the one of Glenn Gould at the piano, absorbed in the music, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe turning away, lost in contemplation - emphasizes precisely what is unfathomable about creative genius.

Occasionally - as in his portrait of the actor, athlete, and activist Paul Robeson - Karsh takes us up close and personal to his subject. But notice the way Robeson eyes the camera with extreme distrust. His expression says, "You think you know what's in my soul? You don't! Back off!"

Only world leaders were presented frontally, their eyes engaged and unfazed. Power, Karsh seemed to believe, is always engaging; these men and women have nothing to fear.

Artists and thinkers were different. Their privacy was sacred; it needed protecting. Thus, Karsh shows the British philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell entirely in silhouette as he smokes a pipe in front of a window. Nobel Prize-winning author Francois Mauriac, meanwhile, is seen in profile in the pose of Rodin's "The Thinker," everything lost in shadow except the outlines of his bald dome, his mighty proboscis, and his receding chin.

After a while, of course, there is something irritatingly theatrical about Karsh's manner (and it really was a "manner"). A wall label tells us that the powerful and famous "trusted Karsh to record their likeness in a way that would protect their reputations."

But it doesn't take long for us to sense the limitations of such an approach. The fug of unfathomable greatness with which Karsh swaddled his creative subjects comes to feel like a monotonous visual rhetoric. The Globe critic Mark Feeney, in his review of the show, imported the Russian term "poshlust," meaning something like "self-aggrandizing banality." It's apt.

Karsh's equivalent in Britain was Bill Brandt. Brandt was a more profound photographer with a greater range (his nudes are among the most remarkable photographs of the 20th century). But he made money from portrait commissions, and he became well-known for them.

In fact his portraits soon led to the coining of a term, "Brandtian," which was shorthand for expressionless stares, sideways glances, and remote, melancholic looks. Brandt's portraits, complained the critic John Berger, "romanticize all the sitters in the name of art, establishing the superiority of the private reality."

Like Karsh, Brandt seemed at pains to convey that creativity comes from within - from so far within that it can only be gestured at, never exposed. The idea is seductive and no doubt largely true.

But in the end, the style of portraiture practiced by Karsh and Brandt fell out of favor for a simple reason: It became repetitive, predictable, dull. Today we have all become savvier, both about photography and about celebrity. Those of us who still get a kick out of great photographs of the famous come to celebrity photography with conflicting desires.

On the one hand, we want to feel closer to the famous, a desire that feeds a thirst for images that allow us to imagine ourselves at the same parties, or on the same beach holidays, as our favorite celebrities. No single photographer has answered to this hankering better than Mario Testino, whose best images resemble intimate snapshots, constantly reiterating themes of youth, sex, glamour, and beauty.

But there is a conflicting urge, which is to revel in the sheer artifice of the celebrity phenomenon. Thus, we also like images that do away with any suggestion that these are real people with real interior lives, because it helps us incorporate them into our fantasies. (Objectifying people is the best way to make them answer to our wishes.)

If the photo spreads of Testino occupy one end of the spectrum, Annie Leibovitz's sumptuous covers for Vanity Fair and Patrick Demarchelier's hyped-up, hallucinogenic fantasy portraits occupy the other.

Of course, no one would claim that celebrity photography today is in any way nobler than it was in Karsh's heyday. There was a basic reticence to his approach that feels refreshing in today's culture of maximum exposure. Both Karsh and Brandt lived in an era that still believed in decorum. Decorum has all but evaporated from the public sphere today. And so it's no surprise that there is often an ugly, prurient aspect to today's celebrity portraiture, linked as it is to the rise of the paparazzi.

The ubiquity of the paparazzi - their total disregard for privacy, their ruthless competitiveness - has prompted the stars of today to become overweening in their attempts to control their image. As a result, serious portrait photographers today have to battle with unprecedented levels of interference in what they do. The upshot can lead to absurdity.

I remember, for instance, interviewing the Australian pop princess Kylie Minogue for a glossy magazine. The editors wanted Minogue to grace the cover. Minogue had agreed to pose nude, her body covered in gold paint. The shoot took two full days to complete and involved endless contractual wranglings, both before and after. (The interview, on the other hand, took half an hour, and was squeezed in between at least a dozen other interviews that day.)

In the face of such tight controls, what is a celebrity photographer to do except flatter his subjects?

Luckily, there are many ways to flatter. Flattery in the old days involved certain conventions that look rather stodgy today, such as contriving intimations of spiritual depth, or enhancing the impression of beauty through theatrical lighting or soft focus.

Today, I suspect, we are less easily impressed. We bring to photographs of the famous a complicated new mix of cynicism (about the whole celebrity machine) and expectation (we are thirsty, just like the magazine editors who commission these photographers, for images we have not seen before).

Besides which, fame itself has a different nature today. It is no longer an outgrowth of talent, as it was presumed to be, rightly or wrongly, in Karsh's heyday. It is a much more flexible, free-floating commodity, as Andy Warhol was one of the first to perceive and exploit. As a result - and counterintuitively - photographers may actually have more scope to explore new approaches, new styles, new levels of artifice and honesty than they did in the past.

Sometimes artifice and honesty get mixed up. Consider, for instance, one photographer du jour, Martin Schoeller, who brings us face to face with subjects like Bill Clinton and Jack Nicholson, cropping their heads so they appear to be thrusting out of the frame and revealing every sweaty pore of their skin. The illusion of being in the presence of the subject is extremely powerful. But Schoeller's images, which extend a style of dirty, aggressively frontal realism pioneered by Richard Avedon, is as mannered - and after a while, as tedious - as Karsh's.

The various expectations we bring to celebrity images today are the subject of the British artist Alison Jackson's hilarious work. Jackson shot into the limelight about a year after the death of Princess Diana with extremely realistic photos -apparently of Diana, her boyfriend Dodi, and an olive-skinned toddler looking very much like their love child.

Not surprisingly, the images went down badly in many quarters. But Jackson, who works with actors and lookalikes, told me her intentions were serious. "When Diana died, people started mourning her death. But they didn't actually know her, they only knew her through her image. So in fact they were mourning images of her," she said. "That is ultimately what my body of work is about: that gap between the mythology and the real thing, and how we think mythology is true."

Portrait photographers who deal with real stars can be as playful and sardonic, as skeptical about the nature of celebrity, as Jackson. They just have to convince their subjects to go along for the ride. They need celebrities to believe in their genius, instead of groveling before the increasingly questionable genius of their clients. Sometimes this kind of audacity can get both parties in trouble: witness Leibovitz's controversial photograph of an underage Miley Cyrus in a sexually suggestive pose. But in ideal circumstances, it leads to a level of inventiveness and wit Karsh was never game to attempt.

In the end, celebrity photography is all about magnetism. To look at a good celebrity photograph is to enter a force field. Sometimes the force of attraction is so strong that the photographer succeeds simply by playing it straight. But in most cases, the image becomes interesting to the degree that the simple attraction between viewer and famous subject is altered, interfered with, or even made ironic.

Many of today's most audacious celebrity photographers - people like Max Vadukul, Steven Meisel, Corinne Day, Ellen von Unwerth, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Juergen Teller - have worked in fashion as well as portraiture. They know firsthand, from the convulsions that rocked the fashion industry in the 1990s, that a degree of skepticism about the industry they serve can actually inject it with renewed vigor.

Consider Teller's photographs of the model Stephanie Seymour sunbathing, self-parodically, on the Jeff Koons "Puppy" sculpture at her husband's estate, or of Kate Moss heavily pregnant and unguarded in the south of France: The first laughs at the extravagances of the super-rich (with the complicity of the super-rich); the other, more intimately, acknowledges (again with the subject's complicity) that even a skinny supermodel can look like a puff adder who has swallowed a too-large mammal, slyly mocking the fashion industry's idea of the perfect body.

The most interesting celebrity photographs have subtleties and nuances that take bites out of the whole celebrity behemoth, even as they feed it.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com