On August 27, 1938, one year before the human race was tossed into a second global war, a profile was published in a London national tabloid:

 

Intimate Diary of a Star-to-be

 

MONDAY. – Agent phoned – wants me to go down to London

 films tomorrow afternoon, see about part in “Four Feathers.” Got to be 

there at three. Must get hair fixed extra special. Though don’t expect anything 

will come of it.

Agent phoned again – can I show Zoltan Korda test of myself? Told

 him there is a test of me made at another studio, but it’ll cost 15£ .

Had only 15£ in world, and was saving it to buy that silver fox cape. 

Agent said forget furs, buy test. This may be my big chance. Agreed – but did

 want that fox cape.

 

…

 

The owner of this diary, which spans two weeks of her life, is the now little-known actress June Duprez. Her diary, in addition to three photographs of her, was published in the Daily Mirror on a cramped page of advertisements and national gossip. The Daily Mirror’s inception dates back to  1903, at a precise historical moment when photography had fundamentally changed the conditions of visual representation in the press. Never before had photography been made less labor-intensive and of higher quality than with the rise of new photographic technologies of the large-format camera and pocket Kodaks. Unlike the press that preceded it, the Daily Mirror was part of a new wave of visualized journalism that captured photographic evidence and circulated it to the masses with unprecedented speed and scale. By using high-speed Hoe rotary presses at triple capacity, the Daily Mirror was printing 24,000 illustrated copies an hour in its first year alone. It is here we trace the origin of the tabloid form, birthed by, and thus inextricably tethered to, the photograph.

 

TUESDAY. – It is “Four Feathers” after all! So happy, cried all 

evening. Knew when was photographed this morning with John Clements.  

Stills with John Clements all morning. Spent three hours with head inside the 

drier, cut off from the world with only that horrid buzzing all the time. Made 

me feel funny and isolated from the rush and excitement of the studio. Tried 

dresses all afternoon. Wear Victorian bustle in first part of film–an old fashion 

whale-boned corset! I had two people pulling in my waist for hours.

When they made it three inches smaller I fainted. They brought me

round and gave me a cup of tea. Then told I’d have to ride in the dress and 

corsets–nearly fainted again. Didn’t eat today. Dog-tired.

…

 

The democratization of the image through photography brought with it the hopeful promise of visibility, that, before the lens, people and places might finally be remembered no matter where they were. The everyday could now be caught in an instant, a single click of a shutter on a camera light enough to be carried anywhere. And when that photo reached the printer, its memory could be shared and remembered forever through an endless reprinting of the same shot. More copies can always be made; the act of reprinting is inscribed into the photograph’s very condition of being. But, with each reproduced iteration, as Walter Benjamin writes in his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the image, or Bild, becomes consequently detachable from the subject it depicts. The moment the photo enters reproduction, it no longer belongs to its place or person of origin, but to the machinery of endless circulation.

 

The three photographs of June Duprez depict: (1) her reading a script while smiling and looking up at the actor John Clements; (2) her, arms linked, with other actors smiling again; (3) a close-up of her looking gaily at the camera, smiling once again, in a bikini. Beside this third photo is the text “Lunch most days is just a sandwich and a glass of milk.” All these photographs of June Duprez published in the tabloid have no fixed dwelling, no singular form. They live in ten thousand copies of the Daily Mirror, on ten thousand breakfast tables, before ten thousand pairs of eyes — each one identical, each one transient. What endures, then, is not June in singular form, but the condition of her Bild’s reappearance, of the same smiling June, in perfectly done hair, embodying the star she is bound to become.

 

The photograph’s multiplicity is not merely spatial, but also ontological. With each new print, the distinction between original and copy is weakened until authenticity itself becomes nearly obsolete. It is in these seemingly mundane rehearsals and costume fittings as described in her diary that June first confronts what Benjamin identifies as the actor’s essential estrangement before the apparatus. The hours of drying hair and the Victorian corsets that compress her waist until she faints are the apparatus’s first claim on her body, and even when she is away from the camera, she feels a sense of dislocation. With every still taken, every adjustment of posture or expression, she learns to inhabit a form that no longer feels like her own. What appears on the tabloid as effortless grace or poise is, in truth, the disciplined choreography of submission.

 

WEDNESDAY. – Too tired to write a word. Didn’t eat anything,

but managed to sit and talk to Rene Hubert, who is designing the dresses.

 

THURSDAY. – Was given shooting script of “Four Feathers” today.

Am learning to ride side-saddle. Fell off once but it was all right. Tried to eat

lunch today, but was too busy being interviewed by two men from the news-

papers. Enjoyed it a lot. In bed now, reading script.

 

…

 

The painting as Benjamin understood, in contrast to the photograph, belonged to the realm of cult value. Its creation was ritualistic: the apprenticeship of the painter spanning years, the canvas-maker practicing their craft through generations of knowledge, the brush-maker meticulously selecting specific hairs, the paint-maker grinding pigments according to exact formulae. These temporal accumulations all united together in order to create a single, unrepeatable object.

 

The painting’s prize was its present-ness, its here-and-now that could never be fully reproduced the way a photograph can. When the painting was reproduced by way of repainting, like a student copying the works of a master, exactness was never guaranteed. A copy was never identical, but an iteration that went through the same demanding process of labor as the original. Its presence in time and space was contingent and able to be traced to the original. But June’s photographs operate according to an entirely different logic. They have no original in the traditional sense. Each photograph by the apparatus obfuscates the effort of labor in its creation, there is just the perfect shot reproduced infinitely. 

 

The phenomenology of its reception, too, is dissimilar to the painting. To view a painting required pilgrimage. The viewer came to the home of the painting, submitted to its spatial and temporal conditions. The encounter with the art was necessarily embodied: the viewer’s body was in relation to the canvas, to the play of natural light across the painted surface, to the specific acoustic space of the gallery, to the presence or absence of other bodies engaging in the same intense process of critical observation. This viewing was personalized: this person, this painting, this moment, unrepeatable. The power of spectacle was sovereign to the painting.

 

The photographs of June Duprez demand no such submission. It comes ready-made to the viewer, arrives with the morning paper, submits to being folded, torn, discarded. It can be consumed while eating breakfast, while commuting, while half-asleep. I wonder if in 1938 London, when this issue stood next to countless others at the newsagent’s shop, patrons took the time to stop and read June’s piece all the way through with the careful attention one would afford a painting in a gallery. Did they notice that in the photograph of her sun-tanning in a bikini, she is drinking milk? How many times did June say she was “dog-tired”? Or were these photographs and words simply subsumed into the greater swath of ink and images, consumed in distraction?

 

FRIDAY. – Had horrible nightmare last night. It was the script,

I suppose. It was very exciting and I dreamt all sorts of fantastic things

which I can’t remember now. But I woke up at 3 a.m. shouting at the top

of my voice about the murder of General Gordon.

 

…

 

The nightmare of June marks the next connection to Benjamin’s dialectic, which is that of the relationship between images and consciousness. Photography freed the hand from the work of artistic production, yes, but it also released the mind from the demand for focused attention. Reception in distraction allows the images to penetrate into the unconscious, entirely avoiding the gate of critical reflection.

 

Benjamin saw a silver lining of this sort of reception. Though he writes more pointedly about film, what is film, after all, but photographs in sequence, a “motion picture.” To Benjamin, the film viewer and tabloid reader consume images in a state of diffuse attention by means of symbols recognition and habit. This diffusion, however, was seen by Benjamin not as a weakness, but something which contained revolutionary potential. And since the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction has been emancipated from its subservience to ritual, the masses can collectively encounter images of the apparatus so as to reveal structures of power, and in this way mechanical reproduction might actually form a new political consciousness.

 

The flaw in this logic here is not in the theory itself, but in history. And emancipation from ritual does not necessitate emancipation from domination. Who takes the photo? Who decides that which is habitually subsumed into our subconscious? In the context of 1938 Europe, when June Duprez’s diary is circulating through public spaces in London, the manifestation of Benjamin’s optimistic logic becomes horrifyingly clear.

 

The same photographic and cinematic technologies that could, in theory, awaken a revolutionary consciousness among classes were instead being perfected as instruments of propaganda. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will had premiered just a couple years earlier and it demonstrated how the shock effect of montage and mass distribution of images served to propagate fascism, the Zeitgeist of Europe at the time. Adorno and Horkheimer would later recognize that in the age of mechanical reproduction came, too, the Culture Industry. An industry where things like art are standardized and commodified so as to optimize profit. Cultural objects like film, radios, and magazines homogenize the public and shape a ubiquitous culture while stifling artistic creativity and critical thinking. This pacified public is thus more obedient and influenced by demagogues. So what Benjamin had wagered would politicize art instead aestheticized politics, letting nationalism and fascism be rendered as natural.

 

The tabloid is a more domestic form of that same aesthetic. We, as readers, are trained to glance and skim while distracted, and in that distraction, the political is naturalized. We accept what we see not as an urgent political crisis, but as entertaining spectacle, its importance dispersed by sheer abundance. In the tabloid, political catastrophe and celebrity gossip occupy the same visual and cognitive register. Everything flattens into content.

 

SATURDAY. – Rehearsed scenes with Clements. Zollie (Zoltan K.),

who’s directing , took rehearsals. Terribly nervous (me, I mean) at first. But 

began to get into skin of part (the girl’s called Ethne) and forgot about being 

nervous anymore.

We rehearse in a special room, and Zollie explained in great detail all 

about Ethne. He absolutely made her live for me. Oh, it is fascinating work. Told

won’t go to Sudan with others. Disappointed. Ate enormous lunch today. First 

Time since I’ve been here. Start shooting Monday morning at 8.

 

SUNDAY. – In bed at little inn few miles from studios. Have to be up so 

early while making picture, it’s good idea staying here, saves time. Take hour and 

three-quarters over make-up. Make-up man says I’ll get it down to just over hour 

when I get used to it. Had lost another three pounds weight this morning, so ate all 

day. Felt sleepy but excited and nervy as a cat about tomorrow and my first shot.

It’s so quiet and peaceful here–can smell the flowers from the garden–

windows are wide open. Shall sleep like a top till they wake me at 6:30.

…

 

June writes that director Zoltan Korda absolutely made “Ethne” live for her, as though it is not June who becomes alive through her role, but rather that June must inhabit and bring life to someone else — that she must now become. In climbing into the “skin” of Ethne, June accepts the bargain of the apparatus; she is becoming someone at the cost of herself. The self-alienation has now become desirable, as though this transformation is not simply impressed upon her, but spawned from within, naturally. This transformation takes shape not just in her role, but any time she is in front of the camera, ready to reassert herself as the star she is to-be. 

 

The tabloid format does something interesting here, too: it can disrupt the Bild of the celebrity also. Perhaps, in another tabloid, there is a piece capturing Juna Deprez in the private sphere, indulging in the mundane chores of living. These photos, taken with long lenses through restaurant windows or of June in her backyard, violate her Bild as a celebrity. In these shots, the veil is lifted, and the celebrity is caught in a moment of being which the apparatus does not permit, and self-estrangement is not engaged. However, this apparent rupture is itself a construction. For the supposed stolen moments of June caught unaware beyond the apparatus, public gaze holds her accountable. We all know the celebrity-caught-without-makeup photos and the scandal they provoke, the outrage of humanness, as though a star being human is of some offense to the public. 

 

MONDAY. – More stills. Heavens! Don’t they know what my face 

looks like yet? Shall smell film developer all my life! I am getting used to being 

photographed, though, as the cameraman said I would. While I was changing

 into another dress a man stood outside the little dressing cubicle and shouted 

hundreds of questions at me. Later I was told he is from the publicity department.

Goodness knows what I told him! My eyebrows have been utterly changed.

I told them not to, but they took no notice. And how it hurts, too. 

My face feels like someone else’s.

 

This is the final stage of alienation: the self becoming foreign to itself. Her subjectivity has been colonized at its most intimate level, and the mirror shows her a stranger.

 

June Duprez would go on to play her role in The Four Feathers in 1939, and again, just one year later, another major role in The Thief of Bagdad. Despite not going to Sudan, her acting career would carry her across the globe, from Africa to North America. Eventually, she moved to the United States with the hopes of breaking into Hollywood, where after a string of low-budget films, she landed a leading role in the 1947 hit Calcutta. Then came her acting decline: no more starring parts, only short-term appearances. She would work a number of other acting gigs before returning to her home city of London, where death would claim her in 1984. Her image was captured by the camera more times than one could ever count — printed, reprinted, and distributed across decades of tabloids. With each photograph, there was the promise of permanence and resilience against the march of time. And yet today, her face is but a phantom of a forgotten century. 

 

One year after this diary appeared in the Daily Mirror, England declared war on Nazi Germany. Seven years later, the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world discovered new ways to annihilate itself. Nine years later, the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, and Churchill spoke of a world divided. Twenty-one years later, a man walked on the moon, transmitting his image back to Earth through the vacuum of space. Thirty-one years later, Saigon fell and the first televised war ended. Forty-five years later came the internet and the digital age. Fifty-one years later, the Berlin Wall crumbled. What was once heralded as the “End of History” became instead the prelude to another age of new wars, new actors, new apparatuses. 

 

This new world is now photographed constantly, reproduced incessantly, and forgotten at unprecedented speed. We document everything and remember nothing. The photograph, which once seemed to grant eternity, now ensures disappearance. 

 

And in spite of it all, I like to think that June Duprez kept another diary, one hidden from the cameras and tabloids. In it, she recorded memories of days not meant for exhibition, of faces unseen by the apparatus, like when she stayed at the inn, close enough to the garden that the smell of flowers drafted in through the open window. I imagine that somewhere along those pages she might have seen a version of her reflection that did not require an audience, that she could recognize as her own. I can only hope that when the world collapsed and rebuilt itself again, she went back and bought that silver fox cape. And that when she wore it, it was not for the camera, but for herself.