the rich and their right to control representation

The ongoing 'scandal' around the nude photographs  of a princess raises  old  questions about  photography and representation.  I am not surprised at the royal reaction. The promise to sue that magazines that published the photos and the loud protests of how it is an invasion of privacy just reinforces  my  ideas  of how the rich and powerful have always controlled their image. They will not be 'documented' in the way the poorer others have been,  and will be, visually represented.

That the future queen comes from  a society which is the most watched and photographed in the world  just adds to the point i am trying to make.The rich and powerful create surveillance societies in the name of 'security'. It  is usually their own security they actually mean. The rest are just a rude threat to their world - the projection of it. the perception of it.

Can anyone believe that the demure, head covered, caring Madonna  image she was projecting  in Malaysia when the nude rude pics  were printed is the real image  of her raw reality?   the madonna image was an obviously controlled photo op to create an image of a caring  future queen.  The candid camera paparazzi photos are the  reality of her 'natural' state. Perception management is what it all about. Interestingly enough it was the French, the Italians and the  Irish media that printed the pics. countries that dont care for the British stiff upper lip and sexual hangups.

When I first began to question documentary photography and its top down gaze  i turned my camera upward -towards the upper classes. The houses  of the haves, to be more specific.  I had to give up on my Nikons and Leica, though,  and buy a Hasselblad  . The the only way I could enter the controlled  "private' spaces of the rich was  as a photographer for an interior design magazine.

Walking around Kathmandu  I was struck by how  the country that has the most cameras watching the world is also the country that does not allow photography anywhere near its Embassies  or even near its recreation centers.  Security . Security that is so  necessary  for them that they enforce it at gun point.

Some of the security and privacy concerns of the rich parts of the world  are even built into technologies.  The loud, very artificial Click sound on the I pad and on some of the phones cannot be  turned off in  some parts of the world. The richer parts , naturally.  The poor of the world will be shot  silently and shown without the necessity of even a model release. .

That  is  the raw reality of the  right to representation of the 90 %   and the  right to privacy  of the  rare  and rich rest.

Updates: 

To get that kind of picture quality before, a pap would need a huge, bulky piece of kit. Now, it's the size of a thumbnail and the weight of an anorexic wasp. This not only creates a profusion of cameras, one on every bystander — the bane of Prince Harry's nights out in Las Vegas — but also means cameras are much more easily mounted on radio-controlled flying drones.

If you look at the sort of pictures Team Blacksheep, a group of American drone enthusiasts have been able to achieve working out of their garages with hobby shop parts, or this polish video of a riot in progressit's easy to see that drones will soon be buzzing celebrity parties and hovering outside penthouses.

Soon, privacy — especially for the royals — will be a thing of the past, and in my opinion, that's a tragedy. We need to do something about this problem before it gets out of hand – even if that means Prince Phillip guarding his grandson's bedroom with a shotgun.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100007678/kate-middleton-topless-photos-with-camera-phones-and-drone-technology-soon-no-one-will-be-safe/

Oh, well, you might say, it’s the French – what do you expect? The nation that uses breasts to sell everything from fishing wire to septic tanks can have no true understanding of how invasive it must be to have one’s wabs splashed across the media without one’s consent. French women practically go topless on the school run, so what’s the problem? No. Just no. A climate of lechery doesn’t negate common decency. And that a female editor can be quite so blasé, quite so voyeuristically vile, about the whole business is doubly sickening, doubly grotesque.

The female body belongs far too much to everyone else as it is, and not just in France. There are breasts everywhere, it seems, a bouncy, boobilicious backdrop to modern existence. In adverts, on magazine covers; here a gratuitous décolletage, there a pneumatic cleavage. There’s a campaign to get rid of Page Three, which I don’t expect to have much luck no matter how heartily I agree with it. There has been a menu overhaul at the “raunchy” restaurant chain Hooters to encourage women to eat there – that means more salads, not fewer tits, I might add. In the past month, I have seen three scrap metal dealerships whose signage was decorated with arbitrary pictures of scantily clad women. When did we become so dulled to it all, so prosaically priapic?

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-violation-of-kate-middleton-what-this-furore-tells-us-about-who-weve-become-8139851.html?origin=internalSearch