The quiet charm of celebrity

Full title: Behind Closed Doors. The Private Homes of 25 of the World's Most Creative People
Author: Rob Meyers
Genre: Non fiction
Attributes: 256p, hard cover
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books(2013)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

This book is the result of an original project devised by Rob Meyers (current Creative Director of Clash magazine) in 2007. In the author's words, the details read as follow:

“This project has been running now for five years. It began life as part of my final year project at Central Saint Martins and was then developed by London-based Garage magazine, who helped me source some amazing homes after inviting the ‘Behind Closed Doors’ concept into the pages of their biannual art and fashion publication.”

The idea behind the project consisted of sending disposable cameras to a number of house owners (most of them celebrities), and asking them to take photos of whatever they thought to be outstanding, quirky, or plain interesting. The book contains images from 22 properties, provided by 25 contributors (as some appear in couples). All topped up by Rob Meyer’s take on his own house.

Source: Thin Blue Line

The book may be regarded as an anthology; it certainly looks that way. But there are several aspects that upset a clear-cut definition. To start with, these photographs are not taken professionally. And as a result, they don’t have a unique vision. They have no design unity either. But it is exactly this lack of polish and vision that makes them look more convincing, more organic.
Then, the way stories are created out of these photographs depends to a great extent on their unedited nature. A patch of ripped wallpaper here, a dinted piece of furniture there, a cheesy detail, a silly thing, a technical imperfection – all this makes it almost impossible to think that spotlights ever exist around the owners of these houses. Some of the resulting images (not all, to be sure) are so mundane, so neglectfully naïve, that they breathe an unexpected air of normality. And this is clearly where Rob Meyers wanted to take his project.
In order to summarize the book (not an easy task, considering its diversity), I decided to assign one-word descriptions to each of the celebrities featuring in Behind Closed Doors, to describe the way they appeared to me through the lens of the images they submitted. I believe even after a cursory inspection of the volume (which relies, obviously, on its visual impact) the dividing lines are likely to appear more pronounced and easier to acknowledge. Personalities pop out, identities take shape, voices develop slowly. And that, when put together, means charm.
So here we go, in the order of appearance:
Cortney Love is agglomerated; Lord Peregrine and Lady Catherine St Germans are honest; Jeremy Scott is colourful; Aimee Mullins is unfortunate; Christopher Simmonds is naïve; Marta Stewart is show-offish; Mr and Mrs Lorimer are bold; Matthew Stone is insistent; Terence Koh is artsy; Olivier Theyskens is reflective; Vince Aletti is saucy; Kyle Stewart and Jo Sindle are intimate; Marvin Scott Jarrett is suggestive; Gary Card is bizarre; Oleg Dou is visionary; Marc Quinn is impressive; Conor Donlon is clean; Tavi Gevinson is open; Simon Foxton is self-conscious; Martin Raymond and Chris Sanderson are mindful of photographic effects; Nicola Formichetti is glitzy.

An archipelago for The Beatles

Full title: The Beatles in 100 Objects
Author: Brian Southall
Publisher: Sterling (New York: 2013)
Genre: Non fiction, monograph, memorabilia
Attributes: 256 pages, hard cover, printed and bound in Dubai on glossy paper

On the scale of zero to one: ZERO (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Here’s an archipelago, a non fiction boulevard where fireworks can crack and spark and the enthusiast be praised for it. A royal collection of Beatles goodies summed up in three words: variety, surprise, enthusiasm.
The reason I like archipelago better than other words to describe this book is its unique ability to grow unpredictably in a multitude of directions, following paths never fully settled, objects that inhabit discreet regions of the Beatles subculture. And another reason has to be the author's ability to turn small, seemingly insignificant objects, into pages of history.

The collection of objects forming the scaffold of this book creates the sense of a unified body where there are only limbs scattered about. That's where the feeling of an archipelago comes from: from the realisation that none of these objects is an island. An ashtray meets a club menu and together join a host of disparate traces between separate episodes in the history of the Beatles. That’s, in one sentence, how things work in The Beatles in 100 Objects.

1964: The Beatles by their wax copies.
via DM's Beatles Forums

Reading through the book one doesn't get the impression that one needs to put on the robe of a specialist, of a museographer or something of the same resonance. A t-shirt will do just fine. Because this is not a pedantic visit to a national gallery. It is more like a stroll on a boulevard: a very crowded one, as a good florilegium should be, and a play with Beatles beads (or should I say memorabilia).

The effort is great, but let’s not forget, this is the feat of none other than Brian Southall, sometime PR at EMI music, who worked with the Beatles in the 1970s when they were no longer one band and who, ever since he's taken up writing, has composed, among other things, a history of the Abbey Road studio, and also a book containing Julian Lennon's Beatles memorabilia. The book is, thus, not only an act of collection but also one of recollection: an indirect memoir of sorts. As Southall himself admits in the introduction,

"the whole enjoyable exercise ultimately turned out to be an almanac of my own youth."

It's no wonder, then, that one finds in The Beatles in 100 Objects so many unexpected, yet perfectly sound objects which have crossed the paths of the band members at some point in time. We get to hear of the Beatles' tailor, of the hairdos they tailored themselves, of things they ate and things they drank, of how they flew over to New York, of how they read on the plane and used their various gadgets, how they wrote and signed and were turned onto wax statues at Madame Tussauds, how they drove expensive cars, how they won Grammy seven times, and how, eventually, they broke up in1970 and officially disbanded in 1971.

This is a story in fits and starts, like all stories: with no real end but with a continuous unfolding of its key moments. An archipelago, to be sure.