Granta, Celebrity; Granta, The Group

By MICHELE HEWITSON

I've Always Been a Fan is the title of the photo essay in Granta: Celebrity. Writer, photographer and curator Michael Collins put an ad in the paper that read: "Have you ever been photographed with a celebrity? Publisher seeks these snaps."

Here, then, is Elton John circa 1985 with Kate Ray (Mrs); Elizabeth Manners with Princess Anne.

The photo of B.S. Downs with Angela Lansbury was taken in a Montreal night club, August 1942. It shows two servicemen in uniform, one with a fag in his mouth, both with wide grins. Lansbury is clutching a glass.

On the far right of the photograph is an unnamed civilian, a businessman who "generously subsidised an expensive night out". This photograph, writes its owner, "may be of curio value".

It's curious how compelling these pictures are. Look, there's George Best in 1971 with long hair, a beard and his own liver, happy to have his snap taken with a blonde with a bouffant hairdo and fake eyelashes.

My favourite picture is of Marguerite Gosney (Miss) with the now-retired champion racehorse Desert Orchid. Miss Gosney writes: "Whenever I meet Desert Orchid I find myself smiling from ear to ear. He is like a special friend who makes you feel lifted."

In the picture Miss Gosney is smiling from ear to ear. She is a real fan. "Some of us are besotted with Des," she writes, "and often use him as our inspiration. Some have said, when life doesn't go as planned, 'Des wouldn't give up, so neither will I'."

Lovely, that.

So is another letter Collins received in response to his ad: "Please find enclosed a photograph of me with Red Rum the Grand National Winner. I do have one of me shaking hands with the Queen, but I look more myself in this one."

Granta's volume on celebrity is "an issue devoted to the dubious rewards and strange effects of fame which successfully avoids mentioning Andy Warhol".



"Celebrities," writes editor Ian Jack, "are often seen as fictions", made up by the media and the marketing machines.

What's the definition of celebrity? Perhaps, poses Jack, it is a "relief from that oppressive idea" of the masses.

"All those unknowable people, but look, here comes one of them that we can seem to know, without the duties and responsibility that come with actual knowing."

Like, say, the Queen. She's in here, and on the cover, courtesy of Fintan O'Toole's portrait of the Jubilee Girl as "a kind of presiding goddess of polite behaviour".

She is a pin-up girl for jolly nice behaviour with her smile for which the crowds wait in the hope that "it will be turned on them in all its elegant luminosity. But it makes no personal connection".

Who else? A cannibal emperor, a lot of drugs (well, drugs can make you feel famous) and the rollercoaster champ of the world.

All good stuff. But I'd really like to meet that Desert Orchid. Wouldn't you?

There are snaps in Granta: The Group, subtitled Pictures from Previous Lives, that are not of famous people - at least, they're not famous for merely being famous.

Novelist Angela Lambert has chosen a group shot with her mother, father, sister, a fat cat and friends.

She stands at her mother's shoulder; her mother gazes over and above her bespectacled, not very pretty daughter's head. Mummy looks a right cow. She was.

"Well, she's dead now," writes Lambert with something like hollow joy at the relief of being free to write down such a statement.

"So I can write about her openly; she crops up in several of my novels as a noisy, vain woman, trampling over her daughter's delicate adolescent emotions. I resented her from the age of seven." Mummy dearest was a racist and a self-centred bitch. What a lovely read.

Tim Guest's group pic is of himself and a group of kids: Children of the Medina Rajneesh, Suffolk, 1982. You can't see much of the author: he's cowering alongside the more extroverted children of the followers of Rajneesh.

"Never in history had so much orange gathered together to say 'Beloved' so often."

These kids - all happy except for funny little Tim? - are wearing in the picture mala necklaces, symbols of devotion.

"When we were older, silver and gold to show our Aids status: silver for tested-and-waiting, gold for an all-clear."

It's worth the cover price for Susan Meiselas' picture essay alone: Prince Street Girls, 25 years in the lives of a group of feisty girls, one boy and Peaches the dog, who formed their friendships on the streets of Little Italy.

Why are they so wonderful? Because they really look themselves in these ones.

* Both Granta, $29.95

* Michele Hewitson is a New Zealand Herald feature writer.