Units of Happiness

Faces of Fashion, Vanity Fair Portraits – the National Portrait Gallery’s recent spate of exhibitions have been centred around the pulling power of celebrity. The gallery’s current exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 is no exception. In this case, however, the theme has been extended to the photographer herself, now a celebrity in her own right. The glitz of actresses, politicians, musicians and royalty rubbed off onto Leibovitz, and her relationship with the influential writer Susan Sontag has only further titillated the voyeuristic public. Leibovitz has now expanded the keyhole by exhibiting photographs of Sontag in her final months before her untimely death in 2005. The tiling of photographs in the exhibition is reminiscent of another relatively recent phenomenon that is related inextricably to celebrity culture and the cult of the camera.

We live in an age in which individual identity was been abstracted into numbers – the barometer of my popularity currently stands at 651. This rating may flicker up if a picture is surreptitiously taken of me on an ordinary day out, and could shoot up should I intend to show my face at a party. The popularity rating I refer to, however, is not based upon the number of paparazzi photographs or column inches about me in a glossy magazine, but the number of photographs of me on that ubiquitous social networking site, Facebook.

In this way, it is easy to focus on numbers as a way of quantifying popularity and the amount of excitement had in a life. The number of photographs can be seen to each represent a unit of happiness because people do not take photographs of unhappy occasions and post them for all friends (even if only Facebook friends) to see. Any unsatisfactory photograph can be ‘untagged’ in order to create the semblance of an idealised life.

It was Sontag herself who stated that photography’s uses were growing parallel with tourism. Her suggesstion in 1979 in On Photography, that “photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had”, resonates through the decades with the increasing insistence on fun being had at every opportunity. This has become the case to the extent that it is becoming evident that photographs are being taken for the sake of them appearing on the internet in the near future. Facebook not only facilitates the uploading and display of photographs, but has generated a new form of conspicuous consumption in which we know at what rate we have to keep up with the Joneses, since we can browse their photos at our leisure on the internet. So not only can the commodities that we accessorise ourselves with be broadcast to a much wider audience, but so can the fun itself.

The question of how this is relevant to Leibovitz’s own very personal images of pain and suffering still remains. In an era addicted to extremities it would seem that whilst we are keen to project perfect images of ourselves, we are equally obsessed by the tragedies of others.

A version of this article was first published in The London Student