![]() ![]() You can tell that you look presidential because made-for-cable movies keep coming up to you on the street and asking you to star. Presidential men these days are a dime a dozen. These days, we prefer the Presidential Model. Look like JFK, you might cause some sort of missile crisis. We’re suspicious of the too ridiculously good-looking. But put them in front of a camera and they magically develop great angles, whatever those are.Īnd there’s a distinct subset of photogenic that is coming increasingly to the fore in the Republican primaries: the “presidential look.” The best way to describe it is that it appears that you came included with the podium. In person, photogenic people quite often resemble ham loaves in dinner jackets or skeletons in wrap dresses. But some things are as clearly unphotogenic as other things are clearly photogenic.īeing photogenic is quite distinct from being attractive. So can cats or dogs or certain alarm clocks. To be photogenic is to possess a rare, sexless, ageless, timeless quality. That second stick figure hunter on the cavern at Lascaux actually was hideous in person, but he had the right angles.īeing truly photogenic means that after you step off a transcontinental flight with icicles in your beard and a mouth that tastes like damp socks, if someone pulls out a camera, you turn inexplicably into Robert Redford - not old, corrugated Redford, but the one from bygone years with a chin that could grate cheese. ![]() Photogenic is a term from the Greek for “not yet balding visibly.” It’s not the same as good-looking. Making for good photography - as Bachmann and Huntsman both do - is a distinct characteristic. ![]() "Someone else who looks better in real life than in pictures!" I would exclaim. I always related to The Picture of Dorian Gray. “You look much less like a weird thirty-something than I was expecting,” people often say, upon meeting me. In most pictures I look as though I am just recovering from a blow to the head with a frozen chicken. But when you see her in person, she is – sure, stunning, but only mildly stunning, like walking into a glass door. In fact I often show her images to hostile combatants, hoping to neutralize them. A good friend of mine looks absolutely stunning in pictures. (There are also the people who are holding the camera, but they will never get anywhere.) I know people of all three persuasions. People who are good looking and look good in pictures, people who look better in pictures than in life, and people who are vampires and do not photograph well at all. Perhaps all this goes back somehow to the comfortable delusion that the camera was capable of capturing the soul.īut photogenics are far more devious than that. Harding, increasingly photogenic people have been running the country. “That shows character.”īut then cameras happened. “You can see in his face that he survived the smallpox!” we would murmur, looking at our officials. As a consequence, we were delighted to elect individuals to office with the raw physical appeal of Martin Van Buren, including Martin Van Buren. We were all malnourished, and if we weren’t, smallpox got us and made our faces look like angry sandboxes. Photogenic people seem to be in charge of everything. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black – or, in this case, the photogenic second-tier presidential candidate calling the photogenic second-tier presidential candidate a – well, it's sort of a mouthful and I think you get the picture.īut it does point to a larger unspoken condition of our political life: the rule of the photogenic. (Lauren Victoria Burke/Mark Wilson/Associated Press/Getty Images) That’s a lot of good photography right there. ![]()
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