Not Going Out Like That

NEW YORK—This week, in ironic honor of the passing of one of photography’s most voluble, prolific and eloquent advocates, former Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski, I went to see the medium in one of its basest forms—the party pic. Dealer Gavin Brown has arranged an exhibition of photographs by Patrick McMullan, who has, since the 1980s, been New York’s preeminent nightlife shutterbug.

Straining to unite the two topics—celebrity and photography—I cast about for a quote relating to the former; I thought I’d hook something by Oscar Wilde, but instead I came up with this, from John Updike: “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s also try the opening pages of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Extinction, which find the narrator staring at snapshots of his family—for whom, to be fair, and to vastly understate the matter, he has no great fondness—and observing that photographs constitute a “distortion and perversion” of reality, and that:

Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of photography are guilty of one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit—of turning nature into a grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls, disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens, brainless and repellent.... I have yet to see a photograph that shows a natural person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century. Nothing has ever sickened me so much as looking at photographs.

Photographs and fame have become such cozy bedfellows since the medium’s mid-19th century invention that MoMA did a show about ten years ago on precisely that subject, but gave to its title the sinister bell-toll of cause-and-effect: “Fame After Photography.” The reviews came laden, not surprisingly, with references to the most famous of fame-photo martyrs, Princess Diana, who was chased by cameras right into the afterlife.

But McMullan is no paparazzo. Really, he’s something of a wag, a genial downtowner, and you probably won’t run away when he or one of his employees wants to take your picture.

Here is what happens when one of them photographs you. First, the approach: You are generally, though not invariably, told something flattering, such as, “You look beautiful tonight, just gorgeous.” Then the request: “Can I get a picture?” And then the decision: It's up to you to decide whether to go with playful self-mockery (wide grin, perhaps some antics such as leg-in-the-air) or a subtly preening kind of self-consciously elegant loveliness (demure smile, head tilted just so, hair gracefully tumbling onto shoulders). Go for the former, and you’ll likely regret it. Then again, there are obvious reasons to regret the latter as well.

After the photograph has been taken, you are asked for your name, and your name is then spoken by the photographer into a tiny microphone mounted on the camera. That is, unless the photographer forgets to ask you your name. Or, alternately, it gets garbled in the recording process, so that when your picture turns up on the McMullan web site, it is captioned “Who Am I?” It is that tartly unsettling phrase that serves as title for the Gavin Brown show. There are even T-shirts for sale emblazoned with it as a slogan; surely, they would do well at college campuses, where the question, divorced from McMullan’s captions, would take on a sort of groovy, pot-fuelled, pseudo-philosophical veneer.

The press release for the show mentions the photographer Weegee as a sort of forebear. Weegee’s pictures of VIPs were grotesques, to be sure, but they were grotesques of a different kind than McMullan’s. Nothing about McMullan’s approach really qualifies it as art, though there is something formally appealing about the pictures’ arrangement here, aligned in strict grids that cover all four walls of the gallery, and grouped according (roughly) to the colors of the subjects’ attire. Just past the entrance to the space, there is a line of single photos that serve the same purpose as establishing shots in a film. These are the pictures McMullan’s site dubs “atmosphere”—a sort of food-and-beverage porn depicting elaborate cocktails and delectable-looking hors d’oeuvres arranged on trays that are tilted at jaunty angles, as though they, too, are posing.