Simulating People

When Brian Howell attended his first Celebrity Impersonators Convention at the Imperial Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, he asked a Roseanne Barr impersonator to pose for him, and she told him he looked exactly like her brother-in-law. Then she asked him to pose for her so that she could show his picture to her family back home. Many celebrity impersonators (or "tribute artists" as they are also called) are drawn into their impersonating careers from the replication of just such a moment: when other people tell them that they look like someone famous. The brother-in-law in Howell's encounter was not famous, as it turned out, so the moment of recognition remained for Howell a mere simulacrum of the "real" thing.

Howell's first glimpse into the impersonating world came at a lively Sunday gospel meeting in southern British Columbia led by an Elvis impersonator who told him that his Elvis costume had given new meaning to his life. Howell had been documenting a small-time pro-wrestling circuit in the Pacific Northwest, an undertaking that led him to develop a formal, almost old-fashioned style of photography that lends itself well to the display of extravagant performance and bizarre spectacle. In wrestling, appearance is everything; much the same thing is true of celebrity impersonation, which combines physical likeness with gestures more or less expertly performed. Looking at an impersonator, one doesn't see the two identities at the same time; instead, your perception flickers between them, and this ambiguity challenges our notion of authenticity, and of celebrity. The spectacle offered by the impersonator is complicated so to speak by the absence of the object in the presence of the subject. When we confront the image of Cher in the body of an impersonator, are we confronting anything different than the image of Cher elsewhere in the culture -- even if the person impersonating "Cher" is Cher herself? What does it mean to shake hands with "Jack Nicholson," whose being as a celebrity is nothing more than the impersonation that he makes of the person he looks like? The work of the celebrity is to look like the celebrity that the public expects them to look like -- in short, to impersonate themselves. Elizabeth Taylor's great work is in maintaining her look, in charging her image on screen, on stage, on paper -- with presence -- just as it was for Marilyn.

Mirrors and refractions

The impersonating world is a hall of mirrors through which Brian Howell has sought out myriad reflections of celebrity at every level, from the neighborhood gospel show, to community centres catered by Lions Clubs, and finally to the heart of it along the Las Vegas Strip, to which Howell returns again and again as he pursues these refracted images which stand as allusions to unattainable celebrity.

The Las Vegas Strip is itself an accomplished impersonator of celebrity places (among its topographical features are structures resembling giant photographs of the Manhattan skyline, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramid at Luxor, as well as miscellaneous bits of Paris and Venice) and it seems almost to be expected that shades of famous people dead or alive might be walking its streets, or that several versions of Shania Twain or Dean Martin might appear at the same time in a hotel lobby, along with renderings of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Saddam Hussein, Sammy Davis Jr., Tom Cruise, Tina Turner, Ozzy Osbourne, Rodney Dangerfield -- a list that by implication grows indefinitely. On a visit in 2004 Howell recorded the real-life exchange of wedding vows between a Shania Twain and an Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in character, before a non-impersonating priest at the Imperial Palace Hotel. (Like so many celebrity marriages, this one did not work out.) Later he got into an elevator with an Oprah Winfrey impersonator who, when he congratulated her on her fine impersonation, turned out to be Oprah Winfrey, impersonating herself. At the heart of the impersonating world lies the casino of the Imperial Palace (home of the Celebrity Impersonators Convention), whose dealers are themselves celebrity impersonators, and where you can be paid off at a Blackjack table by a living replica of Michael Jackson.

The rise of celebrity culture corresponds to the rise of the entertainment industry and the mass media, which in turn arose from the development of photography in the nineteenth century. Celebrity impersonators are a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, and have been proliferating ever since the death of Elvis Presley, who continues to inspire a vast following of impersonators of all degrees of ability. Until the death of Elvis, an impersonator was a deceiver, a con-man or fraud artist (as the newspapers like to say), or a character in a drama; but now impersonators are legitimate entertainers in their own right.

Celebrity's hard currency

Photography is the sole vehicle of celebrity: without the image (on the page or on TV, movie, and computer screens) to refer to, there is nothing to validate the celebrity's celebrity status ("My greatest lover is the camera." -- Greta Garbo). Only in photography is celebrity perfectly expressed: photography alone authorizes celebrity, allows it, confirms it. The impersonator too emerges from photography: enabled, informed, by the celebrity image.

The celebrity world is informed by an endless doubling of images indexed through magazine pages, gossip blogs, and movie and television screens; it takes its life from a supply of images that must be renewed daily or even hourly, hence the demand for the industrial strength photography of the paparazzi. ("A picture of a celebrity is like hard currency. Good anywhere in the world," says a paparazzo in the documentary film Blast 'em.) In the sea of images that defines public space, we find the same faces repeated again and again in glimpse after glimpse, snapshot after snapshot. At the high-art end of celebrity photography, we are given the elaborate productions of Annie Leibowitz, who solves the problem of the ubiquity of celebrity, its essential sameness, by adding patina to her subjects, by piling more appearance upon appearance to the celebrity body -- mud, paint, outrageous clothing, bizarre settings, etc. -- in order to disguise (and thereby to reveal) the emptiness at the heart of celebrity, where one fears there might be nothing to photograph.

Frozen masks

Howell's impersonator photography is the opposite of celebrity photography. The impersonating world is not a fleeting one; it strives toward the monumental: time is slowed down, if not stopped outright. In the impersonating world, Bogart persists in his sardonic ways, Bacall remains forever sultry. The impersonator has already done what the camera does, which is to preserve the appearance of a moment: Howell's response is to scrutinize that moment; he takes his time and by doing so gives us time to take a good look. We linger with these images in the enduring moment as enacted by the impersonator posing for the camera.

Howell remains attentive to his subjects; he does not assault them with the lens, nor does he surprise them, but the nature of his subject remains elusive. We can say that celebrity is his subject, and we can say equally that the mask is the subject of these photographs. How well the mask invokes the absent celebrity is one way to measure the "success" of the impersonation, but it does not measure the emotional investment, the existential weirdness that impersonation implies and that Howell's photographs display.

What we cannot help seeing again and again in these pages, which is perhaps why the photographs are ponderable in a way that straight celebrity photographs are not: these people have succeeded (to borrow from Roland Barthes) in making other bodies for themselves, other bodies constituted in an image and confirmed in a photograph.

These photographs remind us of how much we who do not resemble celebrities strive nevertheless to look right, to have a look, to achieve an appearance that is suitable to us; in a sense, we strive to impersonate ourselves. At the heart of this exercise is the question that many of us ask ourselves at some point in our lives: "What would I look like if I looked like Marilyn Monroe in a photograph?"

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