Three young men—two princes and a nobleman—and one beautiful, wealthy woman. Who will win her hand?
In The Merchant of Venice (1596–1598), Shakespeare has the father of the bride-to-be devise a kind of lottery. The suitors must each choose one of three caskets: gold, silver, or lead. Inside one of them lies the portrait of the young woman. The princes choose the gold and silver caskets. The nobleman, however, opts for the humble lead one—and wins.
He justifies his choice with the words:
“So may the outward shows be least themselves;
The world is still deceiv’d with ornament.”
In The Pleasure of Good Photography, Gerry Badger explores what defines a good photographer. Is it style, he wonders?
For galleries, a recognizable style is easy to market. As Badger argues, style becomes branding—and branding sells. And so it happens, and according to Badger it is a common phenomenon, that a photographer who achieves early success with a particularly striking image starts to cultivate that same style.
Content becomes secondary—or disappears altogether—dressed up in the same stylistic packaging. Photography becomes decoration. Something nice to hang above the sofa.
But it’s not just the galleries. The so-called photography enthusiast is just as easily swayed by smooth talk and surface appeal.
Peter Sellars, the theatre director, already pointed this out in a 1998 interview with the Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad:
“When nothing affects us anymore, when everything simply runs off the exterior, we lose our ability to distinguish. It’s one of the biggest afflictions of our time—that we’re so fixated on the outside.”
In 2018, I made a book about exactly this phenomenon.
It’s called Wallpaper.