People - September 16, 2020

Buying My Self Back: Emily Ratajkowski’s Essay on Illicit Exploitation of Her Image

Recognizing one’s image only when seen through the lens of a paparazzo is a conclusion, perhaps sad in some ways, which involves all those who have built a profession on that image, but what are the boundaries of all this? The answer is given by Emily Ratajkowski through Buying My Self Back, an essay of her published yesterday on the New York Magazine that addresses the intricate topic of image protection.

“Since 2013, when I appeared in a viral music video, paparazzi have lurked outside my front door. I’ve become accustomed to large men appearing suddenly between cars or jumping out from behind corners […] I’ve become more familiar with seeing myself through the paparazzi’s lenses than I am with looking at myself in the mirror. And I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own. “

It all started almost 10 years ago, Emily says, after the unforgettable Blurred Lines video in which Ratajkowski made her first starring appearance. At the time, Emily had started working as a model for a couple of years, with the sole aim of saving as much money as she could to return to work in the art sector, a path she had left behind at UCLA in Los Angeles. It is strange how a job started with all the ease that a young woman has at the beginning of her adult life, can then become an infinite interweaving of changes that will potentially remove her forever from her most intimate and true self.

Emily Ratajkowski tells without too many censures what has become of her image for all these years, what has been of that image that we are all used to posting on our social channels without thinking too much about it. The social channels, yes, they are perhaps the starting point of this story. In the essay Emily tells of having understood that she is no longer, it is true it seems a paradox, the owner of her image. Posting the photo that a paparazzo had taken of her on the street recently, Emily says she found herself having to go into dispute with the photographer himself for having published it in her IG stories without rights. Without rights, yes, although the photo was taken of Emily herself, the photographer is the only one who can exercise a property right, even if talking about oneself as someone else’s property seems almost surreal and in some ways scary. But this is perhaps only the latest of the episodes that involved the life of an Emily until a few years ago still (rightly) too naive to understand how effectively her image was becoming a bargaining chip.

A few years ago a famous artist, Richard Prince, had inaugurated an exhibition called “Instagram Paintings”. The exhibition actually exhibited works of art created starting from the screenshot taken on a celebrity’s Instagram post, on which the artist then added his personal comment. Upon hearing of a photo of herself in that exhibition, Emily decided to go to the gallery and in a mix of feelings that went from honor to possessiveness, she chose to buy the painting that portrayed her. Emily Ratajkowski paid a little over 20, $ 80,000 to buy a photo she already had in her camera roll just so it wouldn’t hang in anyone else’s homes. Do you think Prince asked her for the right to do an art work with one of her Instagram posts? Absolutely not. The reason that led her to this decision, she explains, was the terror of not falling back into the drama that involved her private life a handful of years ago, when an ex-boyfriend of hers put online some intimate shots of Emily that she had entrusted “to whom I thought loved me “. That moment was so hard for Ratajkowski that she wanted to try by all means to control the exploitation of her image, but never really succeeded.

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Emily also tells of having lived what is perhaps the most absurd experience told in this essay. It tells of a shooting with the famous photographer Jonathan Leder which took place in 2012 in the Catskills. Emily’s agent had found her a job and simply told her she had to go to Jonathan’s house for a shooting to sell to a magazine. Ratajkowski says that she found herself in a house in the company of the photographer and a make-up artist, that she was cleaned up well for the photos and that she had a great desire to demonstrate her skills as a model in that circumstance. Suddenly she discovered that the shoot would be done in lingerie at first, and then completely naked but she says 

“I’d been shot nude a handful of times before, always by men. I’d been told by plenty of photographers and agents that my body was one of the things that made me stand out among my peers. My body felt like a superpower. I was confident naked — unafraid and proud.” 

The circumstances experienced by Emily during that shooting deserve to be read directly by her voice in the essay she wrote, but what should be known is that all the polaroids not intended for the magazine and which portrayed the model without veils, became without her consent the subject of 3 books published by the photographer himself and for which, despite the repeated attempts of Ratajkowski’s lawyers, she could not exercise any rights.

Upon the release of the first of the three books, Emily Ratajkowski ran a Twitter campaign in which she denounced the incident and explained to her followers how much she felt violated and deprived of her most intimate identity. The responses from the audience were “trivially surprising”. The women accused her of “having asked for it” for posing naked and as, unfortunately, often happens, the blame was never given to those who violated the law, but to Emily herself. A model, a celebrity or an ordinary girl like any of us could be, is free to publish and giving the image she prefers of herself on social networks, but is she really the only one who can do it? A reflection on the use of what one does with one’s own image seems the obligatory conclusion of such a testimony, but the real problem is that each of us, in a free world like the one in which we live, should be able to exercise the right to be the sole owner of his/her own image. Are we really so prisoners of a society that not only conveys our choices, our habits and lifestyles but even expropriates us when it believes best of what is most personal we have, our image?

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