Botticelli’s 15th c. painting, Adoration of the Magi, for instance, was commissioned by Florentine banker and financial broker Gaspare di Zanobi del Lama. The commission to Botticelli came with the instruction that Gaspare be depicted as one of the three wise men. Botticelli obliged, in the right-hand corner of his painting. He also puts himself in the picture staring right back at us. Gaspare may have wanted to be included in the Nativity scene to showcase himself as a good Christian. But there was much more than that behind this portrait-op.
Botticelli also depicts members of the Medici family, 15th century Italy’s equivalent of a mash-up of the Rockefellers and the Corleones. And it’s the presence of members of Italian society’s most influential and wealthy family, depicted shoulder-to-shoulder with Gaspare in the holy setting of this image far from the banks of the Sarayu, that gives the painting’s client its contemporary power, its raison d’etre.
Gaspare the broker needed to signal the message to the ‘market’ that he was hanging with the richest bankers of the Western world, the Medicis. In the process, what he was doing was bumping up his own personal brand equity. Even Botticelli includes himself (he’s at the extreme right, staring at the viewer) in the picture, as a sort of painter’s extra-fee.
The photographs of themselves with GLs (great leaders) that adorn the walls of the offices of today’s corporate leaders, politicians, cultural commissars, and other rope-climbers, follow the same principle. But the photo-op serves a dual function. Apart from saying ‘Look, I was with a powerful person’, it serves the other more valuable purpose of ‘Look, he or she knows me well enough to have taken a (smiling) photo with me’.
This is not the photo-bomber’s sense of wicked irony – ‘Look whose photo-op I’m crashing, and thereby devaluing’ – but a strategic mission of brand pumping. It’s preening and primping oneself by associative visual means. Social scientist Kiku Adatto writes in her 2008 book, Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo-Op, how, in 2003, images of President George W Bush soaring above the Pacific in a US Navy Viking fighter jet, and then emerging from the plane in a flight suit and helmet, got the media, right across the American political spectrum, gushing about his ‘Top Gun’ moment. ‘So similar was the language of the commentators, from the three major cable news networks,’ writes Adatto, ‘that they sounded like theatre critics comparing notes.’ This was the Big Man photo-opping through action – in Action Hero mode – to conquer public/media opinion. Eyerolls reacting to the extravagance were cast aside. But the photo-op is not necessarily a falsity – unlike the careful photographic retouches ‘commissioned’ by Stalin to look as if he was BFF with Lenin, to coolly suggest that he was Lenin’s heir apparent. Stalin, considered the OG of Photoshop/deep fake, got an image rendered by which, according to Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) curator Mia Fineman in her 2012 book, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, ‘retouchers smoothed Stalin’s pockmarked complexion, lengthened his shrivelled left arm, and increased his stature so that Lenin seems to recede benignly’. This, in 1922, was when Lenin had described Stalin as ‘intolerably rude and capricious’ and recommended that he be ‘removed from his position as the Communist Party’s secretary general’.
As Adatto points out, ‘To plan or stage an event for the press does not falsify its content.’ So, when people line up for visual status, however silly and obsequious it may seem, it serves an effective function that can be spelt out in three words: ‘I have access.’ Both Gaspare del Lama and Sandro Botticelli knew it’s good for business.
