February 23, 2009
Bernie Between The Lines
The photo on the cover of the March Portfolio is from a cache of Madoff portraits just discovered from a ten-year-old photo shoot. (You can read the backstory here.)
Visual culture and media is scrambling now to capture and represent the near-depression we’re in. In that net, of course, we can expect a lot of faces of victims and villains. I had several strong and immediate associations to this image given its relationship to current circumstances. Before you click through and see where I went, however, how does the image read to you?
(image: Jonathan Saunders. New York. Oct. 7, 1999)
Bernie meets Hal meets Hannibal Lector meets the chair.
(image 4 via: A M E R I C A N N E W S P A P E R R E P O S I T O R Y www.oldpapers.org)
11 Comments Leave a comment
bystander said:
I caught the chair, but couldn’t make it fit with what looked like the distortions you’d see in a broken pane of glass/mirror in the background. It was as though the chair on which Madoff sits had flown backwards into a mirror stenciled with the Portfolio’s masthead and cracked it.
d said:
I saw three things:
First, I had a strong impression of Dustin Hoffman (!) playing a very specific, sinister (?) role (that I now can’t remember the specifics of… maybe Runaway Jury?)
Second, I saw a spider-web coming from behind his head… which I only later saw as emerging from his mouth rather than his brain. (i.e. scammer, not mastermind)
Third (and forgive me for this in advance), I though he was holding his hands folded over his groin (self-protective wedding-photo style)… which I later re-imagined as him urinating on us, the viewer.
Digression: Madoff got a bad rap, by the way. He’s no worse than Countrywide Financial or Citibank or ALL of those financial execs, cooking the books for their multi-million dollar “bonus.” Clawback? Heck with clawback. I want jail time for anyone who made an eight figure bonus. (okay, I don’t really want that, but a guy’s gotta dream….)
Susan Abe said:
Very different take: I saw the radiant lines and blue/white color scheme of an icon of the Virgin Mary. Madoff’s face in the middle of it was, errrm, highly unsettling.
yg said:
i’ve seen other portraits where he affects a similar humble or self-effacing (non-threatening?) posture. like i’ve said before, my first impression of uncle bernie was that he had kind eyes.
“hal” as in a deceptive, destructive, manipulative, soulless robot, who preyed on vulnerablites?
yg said:
ooh, nice interpretation. i’m going to start calling him saint bernie.
desertwind said:
It gives me vertigo.
Like Bernie is sitting in a chair physically rushing toward you while the camera zooms in.
“Portfolio” is an interesting mag. It so obviously was launched to catch the masters of the universe at their prime & then the worm turned.
valpy said:
Funny desertwind mentioned vertigo. The picture immediately made me think of this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v407/valpy/Vertigopic4.jpg
yg said:
see pic
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5101153&mesg_id=5101153
yg said:
another portrait of madoff:
http://nymag.com/nymag/toc/20090302/
yg said:
testing
why aren’t comments posting?
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