After years working as an award-winning photojournalist, Brian Howell has now also made his mark in the fine art photography field. Howell engaged BCreative to tell the broader story behind his compelling images.
By one estimate there are 85,000 Elvis impersonators around the world. In our starstruck age, celebrity impersonators are a boom industry. Part of that growth is explained by the dominant social and economic power that a celebrity commands yet can’t always take advantage of in person. Like the bones of saints in the Middle Ages, there are still not enough celebrities to go around. So there is now a big market for mimicry, for subjugating self-distinction to serve as celebrity avatars. Alice doesn’t live here anymore – an even cheaper version of Paris Hilton does.
For his Impersonators series of portraits, Brian Howell has used an old motif – paparazzi snapshots – to place front and center the diminishing value of individuality in a culture drugged by fame. For Howell himself this series is transitional as it shifted his work to a more conceptual stage. The project was developed in an early part of his career when Robert Frank and the New York street photographers of the 1970s still held sway. Certainly the influence of Diane Arbus is witnessed in the way Howell smudges the light and it is convenient to see these impersonators as among her eccentrics.
But in this series Howell presents a new type of person – an eager participant in the hollowing out of society’s appreciation for authenticity. They are ciphers for a soulless time or cultural market indicators where the only stock going up is the value of fame. Howell’s titles tell the riddle of these split personalities. Pavel as Bono. Chris as Madonna. Jerry as Saddam. The first part might as well read blank as we brighten only with the mention of the celebrity’s name. That is who we see first. It’s a clever visual conceit by Howell to make the viewer part of this particular fame game. Do we care enough to see who is behind the mask; does the individual behind the mask care enough to be seen. Everyone seems very comfortable adopting the pose and purpose of someone they are not.
Howell’s photographs – brilliantly captured in a flash of silver light – are compelling, even chilling. These are people who want to be famous more than they want to be themselves.
