“Sick Excesses”: Voyeurism, Pathology, and the Spectacle of Female Pain in Celebrity Photography
Written by Sarah Holley-Carney
Edited by Nicholas Raffoul
Six years before the death of Emmy and Grammy award winning singer and actress Whitney Houston, the National Enquirer published a cover story with a now iconic image of Houston’s hotel bathroom, covered in leftover food, beer cans, rolling papers, pipes, and most notably, crack cocaine (fig. 1). The image was taken by Houston’s close friend and sister in law Tina Brown, allegedly with Houston’s consent as a “united cry for help,” but the framing of the image in the National Enquirer cover story points to a divergence of intentions (fig. 4) [1]. While Brown’s intentions will be kept in mind, the photograph took on public relevance in the form in which it appears in the National Enquirer, and as such the photograph should be understood in this context. The photograph’s aesthetic strategy of communicating pain and addiction without the inclusion of Houston herself, which could possibly help to avoid pathologizing and fetishizing the addicted body, instead is here used to communicate pain through a voyeuristic gaze into messiness and abjection. Ultimately the body is not left far removed from the photograph’s account of pain and addiction, pathologizing Houston’s consumption and lack of adherence to racialized standards of femininity. This, considered in light of the similarities and differences between Houston’s case and the cases of photographs of Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Britney Spears reveals a broader gendered and racialized fetishization and demonization of female pain.
Though the National Enquirer photo is intended to communicate Whitney Houston’s pain and struggle with addiction, Houston herself is entirely absent from the photograph or the attached article. The space depicted, then, becomes the signifier from which a viewer is expected to read pain and addiction. In an interview, Tina Brown said her motivation for taking the photo was to “share with the world, the pain we were going through,” [2]. This explicitly frames the image as an attempt to represent pain, its aesthetic strategies working towards this goal. This allows for the possibility of an optimistic interpretation of the artist’s intentions — the photographer in many ways shared Houston’s pain considering that Brown and Houston participated in substance abuse together, suggesting a degree of (at least intended) solidarity with Houston. Brown’s avoidance of including Houston’s body in the photo can be considered a largely ethical decision for avoiding the pathology and stigma attached to the addicted body in visual culture. Much of the news coverage of Houston between the National Enquirer story and her death emphasized her weight loss and appearance of poor health, searching for details on the body from which a viewer could read addiction. Brown also avoided contributing to a saturated visual field of suffering women, diverting away some of the fetishization of female pain which would inevitably be brought into the image. Despite what may have been highly ethical intentions on the part of Brown, the image’s eventual public profile and contextualization in the National Enquirer greatly overshadow this meaning, which ultimately caused the image to devolve entirely into the fetishization and voyeurism that Brown may have sought to avoid.
Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3: Tina Brown, Untitled (Whitney Houston’s Hotel Bathroom) (2006), National Enquirer.
The photo’s method of indexing pain and addiction is certainly ethically suspect. Though it avoids fetishizing and pathologizing the addicted body, the photo still reads a great deal about pain, addiction, and desire from the disorder of Houston’s bathroom. Given the headlines (fig. 4) accompanying the image (“Inside Whitney’s Drug Den”, “‘I Did Crack with Whitney’ — her secret life finally exposed”), it seems unlikely that the Enquirer had any intention of communicating this image as a cry for help. Rather, the framing encourages the viewer to salivate over the lurid, harshly lit details of the photo, even including close-up sections highlighting drug paraphernalia (fig. 2, fig. 3). The framing also passes explicit judgement, drawing strong conclusions about Houston’s morality from this scene of consumption. With this in mind, any positive intentions which Tina Brown may have had in taking the photograph are more or less irrelevant to the ethics of the image. The Enquirer reframed Brown’s image, eclipsing the suspected original meaning of the photograph.
Part of what makes the image shocking is its messiness: the scandal is not just that Whitney Houston consumed illegal substances, but that she did so in an excessive and unglamorous manner. Rumours about Houston’s drug use had circulated for years prior to this image, and Houston is hardly the only popular musician to use drugs to excess. If the image had only featured the drugs Houston used outside of the context of the unclean bathroom, it is doubtful that the image would have achieved such a high public profile. Female hygiene, here, is strongly associated with morality — messiness, open consumption, and clutter all bring the subject farther away from a “proper” femininity. The messiness of the room suggests consumption with no concern for appearance, with beer cans and traces of food strewn about, something the Enquirer’s framing of the image finds immoral. This goes starkly against norms of femininity and consumption and creates shock through the tension between this consumption and Houston’s feminine public image. Therefore, even though the image does not make use of a body to index addiction, it instead uses a logic where (female) uncleanliness and excessive consumption, as signifiers of addiction, also come to signify immorality. This pathologizing and stigmatizing of female messiness and consumption is clearly unethical, projecting regressive conceptions of femininity and addiction in its attempt to represent pain.
Figure 4: National Enquirer, Inside Whitney’s Drug Den! (2006), National Enquirer.
As one strategy to continue the pathologizing of female uncleanliness, the photo heavily evokes abjection. Discussing abjection, Julia Kristeva writes that “crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law,” is not abject (nor, necessarily, is a “lack of cleanliness or health”), but rather, what is abject is that which “disturbs identity, system, order,” [3]. Houston’s drug use and uncleanliness shock because they disturb the notion of celebrity drug use as glamorous and fashionable: there is no intriguing appeal in holding oneself on a drug binge in isolation. The food in the image evokes abjection as well, existing as “oral object,” signifying “a boundary of the self’s clean and proper body,” [4]. In all of this, consumption and the body are pathologized, without requiring the actual presence of a body in the image. There is also a significance to the photo being taken in a bathroom. The bathroom is a site where the body is central — in grooming rituals, in excretory functions, and (particularly in a luxury hotel) sensory pleasure. These processes similarly evoke abjection, especially considering the stigmatization placed upon female bodily functions. In this, and with the emphasis on the food, drinks, and drugs consumed, the body is actually not far removed from the image. The photograph does not truly circumvent the body in speaking to a larger suffering, but rather adds another layer in a series of associations, where a site of consumption suggests the addicted body which then in turn is used to suggest the suffering of addiction. The aesthetic strategy of leaving out Houston’s body, then, loses its potential positive ethical implications, participating fully in the stigmatization and pathologizing of the addicted body. This is all emphasized by the photograph’s formal elements, with dark lighting and a harsh flash bulb creating a sense that what one is viewing is lurid and immoral, contributing to the ultimate moral conclusions drawn by the Enquirer. By evoking abjection in this scene, the photograph is able to pathologize and pass judgement upon Houston’s decisions about her body without ever depicting her.
Also important in this photograph’s exclusion of Houston’s body is the question of Houston’s agency. As with Brown’s intentions taking the photo, Houston’s ostensible consent in the taking of the image cannot be definitively determined (particularly given that the image was taken in the immediate aftermath of a long period of drug use), but it is very unlikely that she would have approved of the way the photograph was framed by the National Enquirer. Public discourse around Whitney Houston became dominated by a tone of voyeurism and condescending worry, with her drug use becoming the most prominent part of her public image, all occurring entirely outside of her control [5,6]. While unethical on its own, this also follows a history of Houston’s control over her life being taken away. Her family, particularly her mother Cissy Houston, managed her early career and pushed her into music. Her manager Clive Davis, who “brought her songs and scouted producers,” and “played an essential role on all but one album she recorded,” in many ways had more control over Houston’s creative output than Houston herself [7]. It is speculated that Davis and Houston’s mother pressured her to end her queer relationship with Robyn Crawford, in favour of a heterosexual relationship with singer Bobby Brown, whose abusive relationship with Houston was well documented [8]. She also exists within a long lineage of exploited black artists and entertainers who had control over their careers and lives taken from them by predominantly white managers, record label executives, and others who profited from their success. The photograph, then, continues a long history of the denial of Houston’s agency, and a long history of adversity in Houston’s life.
Figure 5: Tom Reese, Untitled (Kurt Cobain Death Scene Photograph) (1994), National Post
With the photograph’s aesthetic strategies and immediate context considered, it is necessary to examine the broader cultural contexts of the photograph, situating Houston’s experience within a long line of celebrities whose pain became a public spectacle. Whitney Houston is far from the only popular musician to have an extremely public struggle with addiction, and the contrast between this image and other images of celebrity drug use can illuminate the image’s specific raced and gendered implications. Another celebrity whose drug use and mental illness culminated in a public, tragic death is Kurt Cobain. Images of the scene of Cobain’s death, where Cobain had consumed cigarettes and heroin, frame this drug use very differently. One image which has recently circulated is a black and white photograph (fig. 5) featuring the deceased Cobain’s legs and a box containing his heroin needles. Drug use is communicated very differently here than in the Houston photograph. The grayscale lends a sentimentality and romanticism which is in stark contrast with the harsh colour and flash bulb lighting of Houston’s bathroom. Death and substance abuse are depicted as tragedy, rendering the pain and sadness suggested by the image as poetic and dignified. This severely contrasts the Houston photograph, where the harshness of the lighting and colour strip away any romanticism or dignity that may be found in pain. For Cobain, a white man, and Houston, a black woman, consumption and messiness are read very differently. For Cobain these things are seen as a necessary consequence of the privileging of artistic “genius” over mental health and self-care, and ultimately as an arguably worthwhile sacrifice for artistic output. Essentially, these things locate Cobain in the mold of the ‘tortured genius,’ in which mental illness is imagined to be necessary for the production of great art. This mold is almost exclusively reserved, in the public imagination, for men—certainly it was not extended to Whitney Houston. For Houston, consumption and messiness are read simply as moral failings. Without the exception created for the “tortured genius”, these things are not allowed to be considered as secondary to artistic output, they are considered merely as the failures of Houston to meet a racialized standard of femininity. This is not to say that more people should be considered tortured geniuses: the label generally misunderstands the relationship between mental illness and creative output, and can go as far in the opposite direction as to excuse the poor behaviour of those who believe the label applies to them. The problem, rather, is when only the privileged are extended a compassionate reading of their motivations and actions, and when only the privileged can be considered to possess sufficient “genius” for us to forgive them.
Figure 6: Bauer-Griffin Photography, Untitled (Amy Winehouse Shirtless, Crying) (2007)
Figure 7: X-17 Magazine, Untitled (Britney Spears with Shaved Head and Umbrella) (2007)
Another useful comparison to the treatment of Houston in this image is the treatment of Amy Winehouse. Much like Houston, Winehouse was demonized and mocked for her excessive consumption of drugs, and met an untimely death as a result of her addiction. As in the case of the well-known photograph of her shirtless and crying (fig. 6), Winehouse faced a similar gendered public humiliation. Also like Houston, Winehouse was also never extended the label of tortured genius granted to someone like Kurt Cobain. However, Winehouse as a white woman faced a different type of public ridicule than Cobain. One important difference between the two of them is which drug they were publicized as exploiting: Winehouse (primarily) consuming alcohol and Houston using crack cocaine. Alcohol is legal, and largely socially acceptable in most circles in the US. Crack cocaine, rather, is frequently connoted with blackness and poverty, a connotation which can account for the media’s fixation on Houston’s drug of choice. By emphasizing this, the photograph and its framing attempt to fit Houston into a racist caricature of impoverished black drug users. Beyond taking stigmatizing and compassionless positions on poverty and drug use in black communities, the attempt to fit her within this caricature signals an attempt to drag Houston down from the pedestal that wealth and fame brought her. Houston’s accomplishment and status are taken as illegible to a predominantly white viewing public, and the National Enquirer image seeks to resolve this by portraying Houston as a caricature which is more legible to the public than a successful black woman.
A surprisingly close comparison to Houston’s situation is the case of Britney Spears, who faced public scrutiny in a manner very similar to Houston. The two share many biographical similarities: both gained popularity related to their appearances, both were pushed into the music industry at an age too young to meaningfully understand what this would entail, both struggled with fame and addiction, and both had their agency stripped away at every turn. Spears currently lives under a conservatorship in which she is not allowed to control her finances and in which she is limited in her ability to see her children [9]. It was her inability to see her children that prompted the scene of the well-known photograph of her holding an umbrella with a shaved head, an image which represented the nadir of her very public “meltdown” (fig. 7) [10]. The most significant link between the two, perhaps, is the way that their pain was made into a very public spectacle. As beloved as the two may have been, the massive popularity of the two images shows how much the public wanted, more than anything else, to see them suffer. The images were so popularly fascinating because of the extent to which they captured this suffering, not as poetic and dignified in the manner of the Cobain photograph, but in a manner which is humiliating, degrading, and morally judgmental. Both artists were Grammy winners, and among the most commercially successful artists of all time. The world had watched and celebrated when they achieved great things, but in the end, that only made everyone more eager to watch them fall.
The difference in race between the two can help account for the difference in their ultimate career trajectories: Spears remained a significant pop-cultural force long after the photo was circulated, where Houston “basically withdrew from public life” in the years before her death [11]. In these comparisons, we can see how Houston was not an isolated case: the forces that led to the popular circulation of her photograph and her subsequent demonization (stemming from record label executives, managers, tabloid publishers, the viewing public at large) are broad in their destructiveness. It is already clear that Houston’s treatment by the image and its circulation was highly unethical, but in light of the prevalence of this type of treatment, we can see how any one photographer or tabloid is not the extent of the problem. Rather, it is a culture that fetishizes, mocks, demonizes, and makes a spectacle of female pain.
In the National Enquirer photograph’s aesthetic strategy of omitting Houston’s body, there is the potential for a positive intention in avoiding pathologizing the addicted body, but this is far from what the image actually does. It instead pathologizes addiction, female consumption and messiness, and finds spectacle and humour in a woman’s private pain. Taken in comparison and contrast to the cases of Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Britney Spears, the photograph is revealed to be participating in the larger unethical practice, normalized by large media conglomerates, of fetishizing female pain and then demonizing women for their suffering.
Endnotes
1. Erica Steiner and Gary Trock. “Whitney Houston Bathroom Pic: Woman Regrets Taking It, Upset at Kanye.” The
2. Steiner and Trock. “Whitney Houston Bathroom Pic..”.
3. Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 4
4. Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror, p. 75
5. Allison Samuels. “Worrying About Whitney Houston.” Newsweek, 9 Apr. 2000.
6. “Inside Whitney Houston’s Drug Den.” National Enquirer, 29 Mar. 2006.
7. Jacob Bernstein. “Production of a Lifetime: Whitney Houston and Clive Davis.” The New York Times, 18 May 2018.
8. Jacob Bernstein. “Production of a Lifetime”
9. Newberry, Laura. “Free Britney: Britney Spears’ Conservatorship Explained.” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2019.
10. “See How Far Britney Spears Has Come in 10 Years.” Us Weekly, 16 Feb. 2017.
11. Nick Broomfield, Qtd. In Brady, Tara. “The Sad, Secret Life of Whitney Houston.” The Irish Times, June 10, 2017.