The bigger picture

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/09/2023 (1097 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Donald Trump, the current Republican frontrunner for the 2024 American presidential race, gets indicted on RICO charges and reports to an Atlanta jail to get a mug shot — well, that’s big political news.

But that mug shot, currently the most famous photograph in the world, is also a kind of portrait — involuntary and unsparing and low-grade, to be sure, but a portrait nonetheless. And that means a lot of art writers and cultural commentators have been analyzing it as a visual image, interpreting it as “campy” or “seething,” viewing it as a resounding humiliation or a menacing threat.

Almost all portraits, whether they are oil paintings, marble busts or photographs, involve a complex three-way relationship among the artist, the subject and the viewer.

Subjects try to present themselves to the world as they want to be seen — as wealthy or accomplished or beautiful. Artists want to impose their style, their vision. Sometimes it’s a collaboration. Sometimes it’s a clash.

But it’s the viewers who get the last word, interpreting the final image as they wish.

In our polarized era, that means this one photograph will mean very different things, depending on the political loyalties of its audience. Trump supporters see the picture as a declaration of steel-eyed determination, a banner of honour, a warning of retribution. Anti-Trumpers view it as a show of false, overcompensating bravado, a badge of shame, a promise of long-delayed legal reckoning.

The image is now percolating through our culture. It’s a media spectacle. It’s a mega-meme. It’s merch (currently being hawked on coffee mugs and beer koozies, T-shirts and toilet paper). More than anything, though, the picture is the record of a power struggle.

On one side, some anonymous official is using a standardized, deliberately unflattering photographic format. The empty background, the straight-on angle, the unkind lighting and the emphatic stamp of the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in the upper left corner — they all declare the official, impersonal authority of the law.

There are some idiosyncrasies — the directional light etches in one side of Trump’s face more sharply, resulting in an unsettling asymmetry, a bit of a German Expressionist distortion. That harsh light also bounces off his hair — always a tricky bit of terrain when it comes to the former president’s self-presentation — making it seem even more amorphous and indefinable than usual.

Trump, meanwhile, is desperate to assert his own viewpoint with his expression and attitude and pose, almost certainly practised repeatedly in front of some gold-framed mirror. His scowl — now one for the history books — is raging against an unfamiliar lack of control while also trying to claw back whatever power he can.

The chin is tucked, the mouth is grim and set, the forehead is furrowed. But what really animates Trump’s features is what several commentators have identified as the “Kubrick stare” — the malevolent up-from-under glare perfected by Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

Those disposed to laugh at Trump suggest a more comic source — famously dim male model Derek Zoolander and his “Blue Steel” look.

But supporters see only serious alpha-male dominance. Elon Musk has pronounced it “next-level,” while Jesse Watters, currently angling to be the new Tucker Carlson over at Fox, is weirdly porny: “I say this with an unblemished record of heterosexuality. He looks good, and he looks hard.”

Searching for comparisons in the historical pantheon of American booking photos, Trumpists can’t quite decide to go with edgy outlaw (Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash) or dignified defiance (Martin Luther King Jr., which is, wow, a stretch). Unfortunately for Trump, the mug shots with the closest proximity at the moment are his 18 co-defendants, sometimes pictured alongside him, arrayed almost like a decorative frame. And they’re a funny bunch.

Sidney Powell looks like a religious martyr preparing to ecstatically embrace the bonfire, Kenneth Chesebro has a caught-rabbit look that suggests reality settling in, while Jeffrey Clark, with a quizzical half-smirk and one raised eyebrow, is still trying to bluff his way through.

Right now, these mug shots seem indelible, fixed and final. The photographer and the subjects have done their things. The big question, the last question involves the viewers: Have they already made up their minds, or could time, and a legal trial, change that?