Displays

A couple weeks ago, pictures of Lindsay Lohan's latest shoot with photographer Terry Richardson for a French magazine called Purple Fashion began to make their rounds. Lohan's pose on the cover is nothing less than a hyperbolic allegory for her role in the media throughout her career. 

This photograph, for all its attempts at iconoclasm, is surprisingly bland. Richardson developed the concept for this portrait, but it simply doesn't pan out with the same sort of dynamism that most of his other pictures have. Instead, Lohan's body is rendered absolutely planer, as if stuck between two sheets of glass, like a carefully cataloged and mounted butterfly collection. The nails on her wrists add to the impression that she has been tacked to a piece of paper. Lohan's portrait is, in a sense, a representation of Richardson's process of celebrity cataloging: his photographs are an ever-growing collection of specimens, posed against a uniform white surface in order to signify their place in his carefully curated catalog.

Lohan looks more herself, or her physical representation of herself in the face of a camera, in this picture by Richardson.

Today, The Sun ran an interview where Lohan discussed the psychological effects of the drug and alcohol abuse that have overshadowed her career. This interview, taking in conjunction with her confessions to The Insider of being a hoarder, is part of a new effort on Lohan's (or Lohan's publicist's) part to recast her place in the media pecking order as a victim of celebrity. When tarnished celebrities feel sorry for themselves, and by extension, their fallen images, do they all turn to self-righteousness?