The Poetry of Images: A Weinergate Debriefing

It’s been nearly a week since Anthony Weiner announced his resignation from the House of Representatives, and we—twenty-four hour news cycle drones that we are—have almost forgotten what all the fuss was about. And so, stumbling upon these once-ubiquitous, but now nearly lost photographs, I have taken upon myself the difficult task of cataloguing and analyzing them. The full weight of historical distance supports me in this important endeavor.

Work type: Digital photograph 
Title: Composition in Gray and Peach 
Date: 2011 
Dimensions: Variable 
Creator: Weiner, Anthony David 
Creator dates: 1964 – 
Creator Nationality: Brooklyn

Jasper Johns, Weeping Women, 1975

The figure-ground relationship in this self-portrait is ambiguous. The image is emphatically flat, underscoring the flatness of the photographic medium itself. At the same time, the conflation of figure and ground together with the diagonal thrust of the composition destabilize the viewer, conjuring the immateriality of the digital realm in which this image circulates. While the overall color palette is muted, contributing to the shallowness of the image, there is some tension between the cool grays that dominate the composition and the warmer peach color that defines the ex-Congressman’s leg. The variety of textures and patterns calls to mind Jasper Johns’s monumental Weeping Women of 1975. It cannot be said with certitude, however, whether this was in the artist’s mind when he created this work.

Work type: Digital photograph

Title: Nude Athlete

Date: 2011

Dimensions: Variable

Creator: Weiner, Anthony David

Creator dates: 1964 –

Creator Nationality: Brooklyn

Donatello, David, 1420-60s

Like a Chinese painting bearing the seals of its owners, this photograph proudly proclaims its provenance—TMZ, and date of acquisition—2011. The figure of the nearly nude artist bisects the composition vertically and is echoed in the edges of the mirror in which the image is captured; in the lockers which stand behind its subject; and in the towel which functions both to conceal and to elongate that which it conceals. The ex-Congressman’s pose combines the bravado of Donatello’s David with the false modesty of the “Venus pudica” (modest Venus). Reflection, however, is the central motif of this self-portrait, with the artist performing the role of the doomed Narcissus, so enthralled by his own reflection that he fails to see its destructive potential.

 

Francois Lemoyne, Narcissus, 1728