
Image courtesy Tumblr.
It’s also raised questions about whether the celebrity photographers who captured images of the events should have intervened to help Lawson. The debate over whether photographers and other journalists should be willing to take action after they’ve photographed people in danger, or whether they should take action rather than photograph people in danger, is hardly limited to paparazzi, or to situations where violence is imminent or occurring. Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who captured the galvanizing image of a small, starving girl being stalked by a vulture in Sudan during the terrible famine there, was sharply criticized for not making sure that the girl reached a feeding center, though he did reportedly chase away the vulture watching her. In other words, this sort of reaction isn’t just limited to celebrity gossip or to the much-reviled paparazzi. Perhaps because photography is so visceral, it’s hard for some audiences to see images of an obviously news-worthy event like the Sudan famine, shot by a hard news photographer, and understand why someone would capture images rather than try to save a starving child, even if photographing that child will do important, long-term good in terms of mobilizing public action and changing public opinion.
But while it’s easy to think that the paparazzi should step in, even if we don’t like to acknowledge that they might be bound by journalistic ethics not to intervene, however loose, it’s harder to tell if, in Lawson’s case, they actually could have done any good. The photograph of Saatchi’s hand on Lawson’s throat is frightening. It captures her choked expression, her face filling the frame. But that doesn’t mean the person who took it was actually close to her, just that they had access to good telephoto lenses. By the time they put down a camera, got into the restaurant (where they might not have been allowed in any case), and attempted to intervene on Lawson’s behalf, Saatchi could have taken his hands off her, or already done whatever harm he intended to do. In the interim, there were people in the restaurant with Saatchi and Lawson, some of whom have already talked to the press about how upsetting it was to witness the incident, and who might have been in better proximity to intervene on Lawson’s behalf if they thought she was in real danger. It’s fun to talk about the evils of the paparazzi. But when domestic violence, if that is indeed what this proves to be, takes place in public, bystanders, not just photographers, have obligations as decent human beings, too.

Much of the
Over at Vulture, Amanda Dobbins has an interesting post responding to the criticism of Life Is But A Dream, the documentary Beyoncé Knowles produced about herself and largely drawn from footage
As any reader of gossip sites knows by now, while exiting a limo on the way to a Les Miserables premiere, a paparazzo snapped a picture of Anne Hathaway’s genitalia and sold it. Hathaway’s always struck me as a classy and smart person. So when Matt Lauer, in an exceptionally gross moment, noted that we’ve “Seen a lot of you lately,” as if Hathaway had deliberately decided to go flashing her nether regions around New York for the laughs and to satisfy an exhibitionist streak, she responded by explaining where the blame for the incident should lie:
It’s been four years since John McCain tried to tarnish President Obama by suggesting that the candidate was a celebrity–as if all famous politicians aren’t–rather than a man of substance. The tactic didn’t work. If anything, the first Obama term in office was evidence that we were ready for a president who was a celebrity, whose wife’s fashion choices were scrutinized and imitated, whose pop culture tastes made headlines and drove viewership, and whose administration became the subject of pop culture itself, from Leslie Knope’s Joe Biden obsession on Parks and Recreation, to Comedy Central’s sketch show Key & Peele, which built its audience in part on the strength of Jordan Peele’s Obama impersonation and its Anger Translator sketch. And now that the 2012 election is over, it’s clear that the dynamic worked in the opposite direction. Campaigners on both sides used these three entertainment industry tactics during the election. And I’d predict that we see more of them in the future:
Normally, I would pay absolutely no attention to anything Paris Hilton says, except that her anti-gay meltdown yesterday and her apology today are a perfect example of how the media’s learned to process offense. The hotel heiress found herself in headlines again after a New York taxi driver clandestinely taped her speaking with a friend in a cab, in itself a totally gross thing to do, no matter how gross whatever he captured is. And
It seems like the leaking of nude photos of famous women has become a routine occurrence, a perhaps-inevitable consequence of the social media age and human error. But the publications of two sets of topless photographs of celebrities this week, a phone camera photo actress Alison Pill intended for her fiance, Jay Baruchel but accidentally tweeted publicly, and a set of paparazzi shots of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, illustrate that while we may have come to expect to see women in public life naked, we’re a long way for establishing where the zones of privacy lie—and how far we should go to enforce them.
