An entire cottage industry of pop songs in the early 2000s name checks them, from Britney Spears’s “Piece of Me” to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” to Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Otis,” and more. They are a useful tool, in the guise of clickthrough galleries, for magazines otherwise devastated by social media’s lack of advertising dollars, to garner clicks. It papers our world, from high to low culture: the popular Twitter account Tabloid Art History paired, from 2016 to 2019, paparazzi photographs alongside famous works of Western art. What is it that motivates us to try and capture fame, even- especially-when the subject is unwilling? So much has been written on the subject of photography, and yet in the twenty-first century it is the paparazzi photograph, specifically, that has become the true medium of our age. Even in this photograph she is a mystery, the very picture of imperial authority. Famed for her beauty, in the photo she is a remote presence, perched high on a horse and hiding her face behind a fan. The first paparazzi photograph, posits a 2019 Town & Country article, comes from 1879 or 1881, and depicts the Austro-Hungarian Empress Elisabeth, popularly known as Sisi. I was so smug, that these sentences could have been adjusted: A photo is a secret about a secret. “The more it tells you, the less you know.” Perched at my computer in 2007, clicking the photos of Britney shaving her head or Lindsay wielding a knife, I was so sure I knew exactly I was looking at. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” the photographer Diane Arbus famously observed years earlier. No matter what they did, the paparazzi were always there. Even when they were condemned, criticized in the news as all that was wrong in Bush-era America. They repelled me as much as they fascinated, these photos and their subjects, this version of femininity and adulthood and sex and danger, and even when they fell down drunk and exposed themselves and wept in public the photos were still taken. I was a teenager by this point, and late at night I’d scroll through gossip blogs with names like Pink Is the New Blog and Oh No They Didn’t and I’d eagerly take them in, all the paparazzi photographs, I was embarrassed that I even cared-but I could not stop looking. One by one, they’d “go crazy,” as we at the time referred to these periods of intense and sudden self-realization, and now there was a new type of photo that we clicked on, so different from the glossy magazine shoots of old. When they spoke of themselves or their careers, they’d use phrases like “my story’ or “God’s plan,” as though their wants and desires were mysteries even to themselves. They were made out to be virgins, the lot of them, though at the time I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. They were irresistible, they sang they were dirty, they liked candy. They were a record industry’s idea of what a teenage girl should look like, sound like, and the contradictions bled into their songs. We grew older, and I watched as these girls, with names like Jessica, Christina, Mandy, and, yes, Britney-they were always understood to be girls most were white and young and blonde-were primped and waxed and fashioned into something entirely bizarre. I watched them, sometimes I danced along. I watched them sing, I watched them dance-I’d watch, entranced, as they moved their way through elaborately choreographed routine after elaborately choreographed routine, and I had to wonder if they knew what they were doing-if they were knew what they were singing-if they understood what was implied when a teenage girl in a crop top sighed and fluttered out “oh, baby.” Did I understand? I was younger than them. Our televisions were clogged with blonde girls, our radios, our blogs. The phenomenon continued in 2006, 2007, 2008, the era I was trying to portray-there were so many of them, these blonde girls. Or not exactly her, at all-there were so many of blonde girls in those years, 1999, 2000, 2001, it’s hard to remember. “The first time I saw her, she was naked and sixteen,” goes the first line of a failed novel I wrote about Britney Spears between 20.
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