Review — May / June 2007
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about press photography in Northern Ireland, fame in America, and journalist Rose Wilder Lane
By James BoylanOut of the Darkness: 40 Years of Northern Ireland Press Photography
By the Northern Ireland Press Photographers Association
Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast
70 pages, 10 paperbound
This slender paperback crisply reproduces the photographs in an exhibit seen this past March in Belfast and, in the United States, at the Washington Press Club. It displays the work of fifty-eight photographers who recorded, often at traumatically close range, the travails of Northern Ireland as it gradually moved from the violence of the 1960s and 1970s into the markedly more tranquil present. It includes such iconic views of that era of heartrending violence as Stanley Matchett’s shot of men bearing away a victim during Derry’s “Bloody Sunday” in 1972 (an image reproduced in a wall mural in Derry’s Bogside neighborhood). But in the latter portions explosives and blood give way to sports, scenery, and celebrities.
Writing about the exhibit for the Irish Times, the distinguished journalist Fionnuala O’Connor scoffed at those who found the display “too sectarian” and said that the real point was something else: “Those who insist that nothing has changed should be compelled by their best friends to go and walk around these photographs ... Look at this small sample of past misery, glimpse the almost incessant destruction of the 1970s and it becomes almost impossible to deny that what exists now is a settled if imperfect peace.”
Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction
By Jake Halpern
Houghton Mifflin
226 pages, $23
Trying to get at the roots of Americans’ apparently burgeoning obsession with celebrities and celebrity, Jake Halpern looks for the places where the fever seems most intense–a convention of the International Modeling and Talent Association, devoted to the costly creation of child celebrities (cf. Little Miss Sunshine); a Hollywood gated development where would-be stars await the call to fame; the community of “celebrity personal assistants“ who serve as slaves to the famous; the magazine Us Weekly, which assiduously fans the celebrity flame; and finally a retirement home where former celebrities wait to be summoned one last time. Does all of this have something to do with journalism? Certainly. The production and maintenance of celebrities–some of them, as Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in The Image, known merely for their well-knownness–impinge increasingly on the public affairs content of our news. Halpern notes that the breakup of two people named Jennifer and Brad ruled CNN for a time to the neglect of the rest of the world. More recently, the demise of Anna Nicole Smith was even more dominant; a celebrity doesn’t even have to be alive, or beloved, to get worshipful attention. Halpern observes: “Ultimately, our obsession with celebrities isn’t about them; it’s about us and our needs.” He sees such needs as growing from American anomie, the emptiness left when communal and family ties disintegrate. People, especially the lonely, unhappy young, look for new kinds of friends, find them in celebrities, share vicariously in their joys and sorrows, and aspire to bask in a ray or two of their glory. And journalism, it is clear, stokes the process.
The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist
Edited by Amy Mattson Lauters
University of Missouri Press
164 pages, $29.95
Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) is most frequently remembered as the daughter who helped her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, write the shelf of Little House books of the 1930s and 1940s, about pioneering life on the American prairies. On her own, Lane was a proficient freelance writer, producing fiction, nonfiction, and libertarian theory; indeed, the libertarian Cato Institute regards her as a kind of founding mother. In this slender book, Amy Mattson Lauters of Wichita State University seeks to establish Lane’s credentials in what is now called literary journalism–that is, journalism she defines as using literary and narrative techniques usually employed in fiction. Her case is not a strong one. In the bibliography, the editor is able to list only thirty-two nonfiction items for Lane’s lifetime; more than half are reprinted in this volume. The bulk of the articles are recognizable less as literature than as interestingly competent magazine writing of their era, from 1917 to 1940. The liveliest is a 1918 article telling in the first person how Lane served as an extra in a barroom scene of a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. silent film. Surprisingly, the final article was written in 1965 when Lane was seventy-eight years old; it was the product of a trip to Saigon sponsored by the Pentagon. Even so, it is reasonably evenhanded.
CJR
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