The peculiar story of Kim Kardashian and his personal paparazzi
"Maybe if you had a damn business that you were passionate about, then you'd know what it takes to run it, but you don't."
It seems almost impossible now to pinpoint the exact moment when Kim Kardashian's face and body became as ubiquitous as the McDonalds logo or a can of Coca-Cola. It wasn't in 2007, when the video surfaced of her having s**x with Ray J (because she was "horny, and she felt like it"). Wikipedia, referring to the s**x tape, euphemistically describes Kim as "born in 1980" but "active since 2007". It was also not in October of that same year, when Keeping Up With The Kardashians first aired, or in December, when Kim posed for Playboy and claimed that she did it "classy" because of her "big ass." her.
It wasn't because of her brief appearance in Disaster Movie back in 2008, her announcement for Carl's Jr. in 2010, or her wax figure at Madame Tussauds in the same year. Although by the end of 2010, she was the third-richest reality star in Hollywood, and by the following year, Keeping Up with the Kardashians had been renewed for two more seasons for a modest $50 million. . Her fame probably started when she sat naked on a motorcycle with Kanye West in his video for Bound 2.
The most valid answer seems to be the year that Kim Kardashian opened an Instagram account and, like many other artists, found her means of expression. Since then, she's created a wildly successful smartphone game, clothing line, and beauty line, and has publicly endorsed waist-training corsets, teeth whiteners, and diet-friendly lollipops. Today, the value of Kim's fortune reaches 350 million dollars, and yet her best product is and always will be Kim Kardashian: her face and her body, recognizable enough to become a logo and that evolves each year towards perfection, moving further and further from the earthly world. "We want there to be something else [about Kim Kardashian], some reason or context, some grand explanation that tells us why we live in the times we live in," Brian Moylan wrote in Time in 2014, after his PAPER cover revolutionized the internet. , "but there isn't," he concluded. "Kim Kardashian's butt is nothing but an empty promise."
But isn't s**xual desire often based on empty promises?
A year after the Time article was published, Kim Kardashian marketed a book with her best selfies, whose title is – proving that she was very smart – Selfish.
"Yes, as Wikipedia puts it, Kim has been 'active' since 2007, she has spent over a decade changing and perfecting her face and body, making it a continuously evolving work with a longer gestation period than any other. Ulysses by James Joyce".
With all this in mind, it is understood that what Kim Kardashian wants above all else is the free circulation of her image. She is her own publicity, hers most valuable asset and investment: there are no Kardashian products without Kim, and there is no more convincing endorsement of the Kardashian lifestyle than her proudly fabricated s**x appeal. and that absorbs all her time. (Yes, as Wikipedia puts it, Kim has been "active" since 2007, she's spent over a decade changing and perfecting her face and body, making her a continually evolving work with a longer gestation period than hers. Ulysses by James Joyce.
When paparazzi began complaining in 2017 about the Kardashian family using their photos online without paying for them, the reality stars seemed surprised by this unexpected turn of events. That's when the same paparazzi went after her fans by shutting down the websites where her pictures were shown, and Kim was particularly scared. It may have been her love for her fans that made her furious; It was also, without a doubt, the elimination of what until then had been great publicity, the open distribution of: herself.
"I hate when paparazzi agencies shut down all fan accounts!" she wrote on Twitter in late August of last year. “Ugh we have to think of something! Maybe start our own agency? And let all the fans post what they want!!!!! Let me brainstorm with the fam!”
Kim is, whatever else you might think of her, an absolutely brilliant businesswoman with a mind for money. Six months later, she had discovered an ingenious way to deal with the embargo on her images. "By the way," she shared last week, "since paparazzi agencies don't allow fans to share their photos, all my photos from now on will be done by my own photographer, and you guys can always repost whatever you want." If I ever post from an agency, I'll tag them and have permission. So please don't post them again!"
Kim Kardashian, a lifelong fan of Elizabeth Taylor, has no doubt seen the parallels between her decision to hire a personal photographer and Taylor's decision to hire Gianni Bozzacchi for the same job in the late 1990s. sixty. Like Kardashian, what Taylor wanted was control over her, a way to crystallize her image in the public eye according to the person she wanted to become. Unlike Kim Kardashian, Taylor didn't have to compete with Instagram, Twitter, or the Daily Mail. But unlike Kim, she was not only a famous beauty with a perfume line, but also a great actress. Her appearance was part of the image, yes, but she wasn't everything, and she wasn't as widely disseminated or as thoroughly dissected as the image of a modern woman with a s**x tape and a 13-season reality show.
It's hard to know which is the weirder part of this particular story, especially in 2019: the extremely public women being sued for reproducing their own images, or the idea that Kim Kardashian's fans see her decision to work with her own photographer as something altruistic, motivated solely by love.
I'd argue that Kardashian doesn't need to be motivated—or at least just motivated—by love, when she has an empire to run, and when her face and body are her currency. More so than Gigi Hadid, who has also been sued by the paparazzi for the illegal use of her own image on her Instagram, Kim's brand is totally synonymous with her personal style, her silhouette, and her ability to simply be Kim. before public opinion. Her most lucrative job remains, perfume and beauty products and mobile games notwithstanding, she exists to be seen; she is, despite having released her own range of Kimojis, practically an emoji on her own. "I'm a businesswoman," she has said. "'Ambitious' is my middle name." No lawsuit will come between our eyes and Kimberly 'Ambitious' Kardashian's indelibly meticulously sculpted form.
In her own words, "Maybe if you had a damn business that you were passionate about, then you'd know what it takes to run a business, but you don't."
