Photographed in profile on Vanity Fair’s front cover, Moore’s right arm and hand is shielding her breasts, her left arm and hand frames and cradles her heavily preg- nant belly. Moore’s flawless, taut, tanned skin is lit in such a way as to glow and has an intensely luminous quality. For Richard Dyer, this use of lighting is intim- ately connected to whiteness. As he writes: ‘Idealised white women are bathed in and permeated by light. It streams through them and falls onto them from above’ (1997: 122). In this way, the lighting emphasises that Moore’s whiteness is a crucial part of her ideality. She is a ‘glowing pure white woman’ (Dyer 1997: 122). In the photograph, the light lingers on her made-up face and the taut skin of her preg- nant belly. Her head is tilted upwards and turned to face the spectator. The photograph employs the conventions of ‘photographic art’: it is a highly stylised image employing elaborate lighting and high-resolution, high-quality printing. The only items Moore is wearing in the image are diamond earrings and a large diamond ring, both of which are emphasised through the position and extension of her hand. The diamonds signify wealth, success, class and stardom. This use of ‘props’ makes reference to the iconography of classical portraiture, in the fine art traditions of painting and photography. Moore’s gaze in the photograph is indeterminate; she is neither looking at the camera nor away from it. As a result, the image lacks any clear point of identification for the spectator. Read in the 74 Imogen Tyler
context of classical portraiture, Moore’s indeterminable gaze is reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s descriptions of the gaze of the Virgin in Giovanni Bellini’s paint- ings: ‘The faces of his Madonnas are turned away, intent on something else that draws their gaze to the side, up above, or nowhere in particular’ (1993: 247). Despite the obvious differences between this image – a photograph taken in 1991 of a heavily pregnant actress – and those of Bellini’s fifteenth-century paintings, such a comparison is nevertheless enlightening, since Bellini’s Madonnas are the Virgin mothers of sons: submissive, passive and devoid of sexual desire.5
In contrast, this statuesque representation of pregnant embodiment is incongru- ously sacred, maternal and erotic. Her glowing white purity has an ambivalent relationship to the sexuality her pregnant body simultaneously exudes.
Moore’s indeterminate gaze can be read as an attempt to give this photograph an acceptable and familiar lineage in fine art. If Moore had been shot directly returning the gaze of the spectator, if her gaze had broken through the shiny surface of the photograph, this image would have been more difficult to accept, as it would have been more readily interpreted as inappropriately sexually inviting.6
However, although Moore does not return the gaze of the voyeur directly, her gaze towards the spectator, when taken together with the enclosing poise of her body, particularly the shielding of the nipples from view, identifies her as a subject who is aware she is being looked at. In this photograph, Moore invites the look of the voyeur, but demurely, with a little class. Her ambivalent gaze thus perplexes, ‘an act of looking that would simply make her body an object’ (Connor 1999: 45).
When the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair was published, many newsagents in the US placed it on the top shelf alongside pornographic publications, precisely because there was no received way of interpreting and classifying such an image. Given the general invisibility of pregnant bodies in popular media this photo- graph was highly unusual when it was first published.7 This was the first time a
celebrity figure had posed heavily pregnant for a high-profile publicity photoshoot and it was and still is an image that is difficult to ‘read’. This difficulty in interpret- ation was apparent in the unprecedented and highly contradictory public responses to it and media interest in it. The cover ‘provoked the most intense controversy in Vanity Fair’s history: ninety-five television spots, sixty-four radio shows, 1,500 newspaper articles and a dozen cartoons’ (Stabile 1994: 84). It became the best-selling single issue in the magazine’s history, even though in the US alone about two dozen newsagent chains made the decision that the issue was unsuitable for ‘family stores’, and refused to carry it.8
On publication the front cover photograph was immediately circulated and reprinted around the globe and was considered significant enough to make the headlines on news bulletins across the US, Europe and Japan. Clearly sensing the controversy this cover would provoke, and undoubtedly trying to capitalise on it, the magazines publishers, Condé Naste Publications, sent out many US copies of the issue sealed in a plastic bag, with a sheet of paper demurely veiling the pregnant torso, leaving only Moore’s face and the Vanity Fair title visible. This veiling reiterates the taboo status of the naked pregnant body, which the photograph in turn challenges.
Moreover, this process of veiling and unveiling also relates to the attention to Celebrity, pregnancy and subjectivity 75
surface that is a key feature of this photograph. What the magazine’s brown wrapper cover veils is an image of Moore’s skin. However, once unveiled, the photograph itself can be seen to represent the body’s surface in such a way that Moore’s pregnant body is both hyper-visible and yet concealed through surface. Steven Connor (1999) writes about this ambivalence of surface in terms of shiny skin:
Like the modernist building faced in glass, the shining skin is able to hide in plain sight [. . .] The shine of the skin deflects and diffuses the perforative, punctual line of sight across the horizontality of the planar body. The skin thus becomes a sort of mirror, borrowing the mirror’s depthlessness and invisibility (the mirror offers everything to the eye but itself, for you can only ever look in a mirror, never at it). [. . .] The skin mirror effaces itself in its visibility, but also retains a certain opacity.
(1999: 45)
Moore’s skin is presented through the use of lighting, the pose of her body and the colour of the print, in such a way that it takes on the unreal and depthless quality that Connor outlines above. Moore’s skin is immaculate, perfect. She appears to be clothed by her skin. She is wearing her skin. This concealing wearing of the skin frustrates the spectator’s desire to see all. There is a play between nakedness and nudity, between visibility and invisibility in this image, which entices the spectator to peer at the display of the pregnant body, while simultaneously offering a body surface that offers none of the satisfaction of depth. This perplexing play of surface, ‘operates as an impossible “flat depth” of viscous liquidity, a diffulgence that never divulges itself to the eye’ (1999: 46). The realist claims of the history of photographic practice, promised to reveal all, and yet here in the reflective shiny surface of both the magazine cover and Moore’s skin itself, what we anticipate seeing is precisely shielded from view. This photo- graph and its presentation to the spectator thus play with the relationship between surface and depth, which might be said to characterise photography as a visual form. Through its deployment of reflective surfaces, this skin-tight image of preg- nancy displaces the cultural imaging of the maternal as open, porous and undif- ferentiated. Skin operates in this image as ‘a kind of visual immune system’ (Connor 1999: 47) against the penetrative gaze. Interestingly, for Connor, this operation of the shiny skin surface as a shield against the objectifying gaze, evokes ‘a masculinised conception of the body surface. [. . .] a kind of hardness that would enclose, canalise or otherwise discipline the threatening fluidity attributed to the female body or the feminised interior’ (1999: 46). The opposition between masculine exteriority and feminine interiority is apparent in the familiar theor- etical and popular representations of the maternal as the abject inside, which threatens the skin-boundary of the individualised (masculine) subject. Given this, it is important to consider how the maternal body has been constructed as that which must be abjected by the (masculine) subject.