They are ready to take the first step of making a civil address: the presentation of a grievance” (143). Azoulay, however, centers her analysis on the photography of ‘injured persons’ as a distinct class of people whose impaired citizenship can be restored through the photographic act, through that induction into a space of shared citizenship.Īzoulay builds her argument on the addresser as an injured person and on a moment of that acknowledgement: “I can read the consent of those who are photographed. According to Azoulay, then, Britney’s claim to ownership in these cover photos joins the claim made by the paparazzo stalking the photo, the camera capturing the image, and the spectator who consumes it. Azoulay’s civil contract denies us this simple definition of image ownership when she asserts that “…the photograph exceeds any presumption of ownership or monopoly…” (12). In a legal and practical sense, the owners of such photographs are explicit: the paparazzo takes the picture and resells it directly or through a chain that allows such publications to reproduce and appropriate ownership of the photograph. In the case of these paparazzi photos, the question as to who owns the photograph is negotiable. While Azoulay emphasizes photography as a mechanism for rehabilitating the citizenship of otherwise dispossessed photographed subjects, an application of this civil contract to the paparazzi photographs of Britney Spears’s 2007 meltdown complicates Azoulay’s theory. Azoulay posits this photographic event as a moment for the equal and mutual induction of these various actors into the civil contract of photography. As this paper asserts, the layered networks of actors responsible for the making of Britney’s iconic visual narrative are transformed and thus dictate the space of citizenry Azoulay first claims.Īriella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography defines the actors inherently present in photographic events: the photographer, the camera, the photographed subject, and the spectator. Beginning with Azoulay’s analysis of the space over the image itself, expanding into Gursel’s analysis of the reproduced image’s web of circulation, and emerging on the surface of lived reality through Alloula’s theory, I argue that ‘Britney’ as a photographic site becomes a space mitigated by the photograph in its abstract and its material being. In moving from an application of Azoulay’s proposed contract of citizenry, Gursel’s understanding of the creation of news-images, and Alloula’s locating of the photographic act in a larger moment of social relations, this paper returns to Azoulay’s imagined photographic space. ![]() Using Ariella Azoulay, Zeynep Gursel, and Malek Alloula’s theories on photography, I posit Britney’s breakdown’s visual narrative and iconography as a space in which actors involved in the media’s production, presentation, distribution, and consumption are transformed. This paper seeks to understand what is accomplished, and by whom, in the imagined space of these Britney photographs, as well as to ask how, and upon whom, the photographs act in the world space outside of the photograph. The visual phenomenon of Britney’s 2007 head-shaving incident traveled in the form of those two images. The New York Post attributes this to “madness” and calls Britney a “buzz kill.” 4 cover features a different photo of Britney from the same series: scalp exposed, ring of dark hair, but this time Britney looks into the (presumed) mirror with a smile as she holds a shaver to her temple. US Weekly writes “HELP ME” across the cover, Daily News places Britney on the edge of a breakdown, and People Magazine reiterates the Daily News. Yet, these covers are anything but ambiguous. Her gaze is arresting in its pointedness and ambiguity. Her eyes stare straight at the camera, the paparazzi, and the spectator. ![]() ![]() With the crown of her head clean shaven and the rest of her dark brown hair falling down her back, Britney is pictured with a seemingly emotionless expression. Breaking Down the Visual Narrative of Britney Spears’s 2007 Breakdownīritney Spears gazes the same gaze out from the cover of US Weekly Fig.
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