Reading Photographs of Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart Through Baudrillard

Kristen Stewart

Rob Pattinson

Beings, objects are such that, in themselves, their disappearance changes them.....But it is in this sense that they are faithful to themselves, and that we must be faithful to them....in the sensuous illusion of their appearance .....For illusion is not the opposite of reality; It is a more subtle reality which enwraps the primary one in the sign of its disappearance. Every photographed object is merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else. ....the absence of the world which is present in every detail, reinforced by every detail - like the absence of the subject reinforced by every feature of a face. (TPC 87)

Rob Pattinson London Water for Elephants Premiere

The silence of photography. One of the most precious qualities, unlike the cinema, TV, or advertisements, on which you always have to impose a silence. ....Silence of the image, which requires....no commentary. But silence of the object, too,  which photography wrests from the thunderous context of the real world.  Whatever the violence, speed or noise which surrounds it, it gives the object back its immobility and its silence. ....it re-creates the equivalent of the desert, of the stillness of phenomena.....All retouching, all repentance, has, like all posing, an abominably aesthetic character. The solitude of the photographic subject in space and time is correlative with the solitude of the object and its temperamental silence. What photographs well is what has found its temperamental identity, that is, no longer has need of the desire of the other....The only deep desire is not for what I lack, nor even for the person who lacks me (though that is, itself, more subtle), but for the person who does not lack me, for what is perfectly capable of existing without me. Someone who does not lack me - that is radical otherness.  Desire is always the desire for that alien perfection, at the same time as it is the desire to shatter it, to break it down. You get aroused only for things whose perfection and impunity you want both to share and to shatter.  Where does the objective magic of photography come from? The answer is that it is the object which does all the work.  Photographers will never admit it, and always argue that all the originality lies in their vision of the world. This is how they take photos that are too good, confusing their subjective vision with the reflex miracle of the photographic act.  ....making people a little more enigmatic to themselves, a little more alien to one another. ....in the photographic act, it is not a question of taking them for objects but of making them become objects, and hence making them become other - that is, of taking them for what they are.(TPC 88-90) From The Perfect Crime

These four photos are pure appearance.  No coiffed hair, designer lipstick, makeup, clothes,arranged setting with props, posed  bodies, professional smiles. They are just there. Simply there in their otherness.  

Kristen Stewart Out Take