There’s plenty of confusion about the actual terms of Andy Warhol’s prediction that ”in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”.
The saying comes back as 15 seconds and sometimes the future tense is even left out to suggest that today everyone gets to be world-famous for 15 minutes.
It’s recorded that Warhol himself keyed into the useful mutability of the phrase and kept on changing it to cause consternation.
In an essay on Egyptian-born photographer Youssef Nabil the concept returns as fame for 15 seconds. New York-based Octavio Zaya (one-time co-curator of the now-defunct Johannesburg biennale) notes that in our age of over-consumption and fleeting fame ”eternity might need some restoration”, and that is why the photographer has resorted to hand-tinting his prints.
What all the mutations of Warhol’s statement betray is the human anxiety about longevity. What photography offers us is an opportunity to ”preserve life”, as the most beloved of critics, Roland Barthes, put it after noting that photography also ”produces death”.
The death aspect is not automatically meaningful, and surely nobody imagines the dreamy young Nabil going out to kill his friends with his camera. In fact, his book is called I Won’t Let You Die (Hatje Cantz). According to the interviews and essays about his work, Nabil says he uses photography to hang on to images of the Arabic cinema he saw in his youth and to cling to the moment he shares with his subjects.
He is quoted saying: ”When photographing people I always think of how to make this moment eternal, before they die, or before I die.”
Nabil, who was once the assistant of David LaChapelle, learned three things from his predecessors: get the famous to sit for you, take evocative self-portraits and portraits of exotic unknowns. What Nabil has brought to the process is a thoroughly Arabic love of brocade.
The fabric has a timeless grandeur — and in it, or lying against it, anyone can be a star. Zaya hints that in his constructs Nabil is on the path of exploration to find his place somewhere between the occident and the Orient. He is also not afraid to ”Orientalise”. Nabil’s art is an acknowledgement that the cultures of Asia and the Islamic world are on the rise and his images play with the complexities brought about by this.
On the same end of the photographic spectrum is the recently released Miss Beautiful (Dayone) by Stan Engelbrecht, with written portraits by Tamsen de Beer. The images seem less constructed than Nabil’s, but this book about South Africa’s beauty queens is premised on the fact that, once photographed, ordinary people who’ve sparkled for a mere moment are immortalised.
Not that all of them would want to be crystallised this way. Engelbrecht’s portraits of men and women wrapped in satin sashes shows the gorgeous vulnerability of the South African condition — how our experience of being left out in the cultural cold has given us a distinct national personality. And so you have the proud tales of Lizelle Opperman, the National Potato Festival Queen, Mr HIV/Aids Awareness Sam Manganye, Miss SPCA Le-Mari Smit and Balungile Zikalala, who won Little Miss Skwatta Camp.
While we may snigger at these beauty queens for their parochialism, De Beer, who describes all 32, is tastefully admiring of their singular achievement.
Equally humbling is their contexts: school halls, shack towns and middle-lower-class houses. The promise, of course — and one begins to hope that it’s not all false — is that by being chosen above others in some backwoods, the beauty queen can in fact become somebody.
Either way, Engelbrecht and De Beer have done two things: they’ve immortalised an important moment in these lives and they’ve provided a snapshot of a random moment in the country’s history.