Notes
1. The style of shoes that Princess Diana is wearing are known as "spectator pumps," as if subtly reinforcing the idea that she is a stranger here herself.
2. To date, the name of the photographer and the original circumstances of the publication of this image remain something of a mystery. The photograph appears to be one in a sequence taken in June of 1997, when Mother Teresa and Princess Diana met at the Sisters Missionaries of Charity convent in the Bronx. As a critic of popular culture and the World Wide Web, I am interested in the ways that photographs of celebrities travel from web page to web page, from new owner to new owner without attribution. At some level, the icon (in this sense, the image of Diana and Teresa) exists as a copy of a copy of a copy. Its meaning lies in the fact that it can be reproduced easily and cheaply and without provenance.
3. It is the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant that prescribed the aesthetic response of distance. For more information, see Kant's "Critique of Judgment" (1790). For commentary, refer to Essays in Kant's Aesthetics , edited by Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
4. Susan Hubert argues that Elton John's recapitulation of his famous song about Marilyn Monroe, "Candle in the Wind," for Diana's funeral elides the fact that the original lyrics were always present in the memories of the listener:
Although the lyrics about Diana have been changed to "You were the grace that placed itself / Where lives were torn apart" from "You had the grace to hold yourself / While those around you crawled," the original lyrics are not really erased. In the context of Diana's life, "those who crawled" could be Prince Charles and the Royal Family. . . . (127)
5. In I Corinthians, Paul notes that life on earth is reflected "in a mirror dimly" (also translated as "through a glass darkly"). Life is only half of our experience. The photograph is but a copy of that half-experience of life. It only approximates the beloved. The clear glass is being loved by God. The image of the human does not meet the nature of the Divine. The image is flat, secular. The icon, on the other hand, embodies two realities , the divine and the material. A photograph cannot be an icon because it only captures the flesh. It can be a memorial but it can never be transfigured because the subject is not Divine (I Corinthians 13:12).
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