One Hour Photo by Mark Romanek
One Hour Photo (2002), directed by Mark Romanek, is an uncomfortable thriller about “Sy the Photo Guy” or Sy Parrish, a photo technician working at the local mall. Sy is depicted as a lonely and obsessive character who is deeply yearning for companionship and a family in his life. Due to his job of processing a lot of people’s very intimate photographs regularly, Sy gets to witness the customer’s lives and be included in them in an unusual manner. He watches their lives in pictures and lives vicariously through them. He is specifically fixated on the Yorkin family, who are a family of three and are regular customers, who, based on their photographs, seemingly live the picture perfect, American dream life. However, throughout the movie, we realize that the family is not the perfect dream family it appears to be on the photographs. Ironically, Sy discovers that through another customer’s pictures that depict Will Yorkin having an affair with her. Sy, who was filling the family shaped hole in his life through an unhealthy relationship with the Yorkins, snaps as a result of this. As he’s personally invested and feels entitled to the Yorkin family, he seeks his own justice by sexually assaulting and violating the cheating couple at the end.
We can think of photography as a form of performance. As it is also pointed out by Sy in the movie, we take pictures of what we want to remember, in the way we want to remember them. They aren’t a fully accurate portrayal of reality, they are selective. For most photography, there is a deliberate process of setting up an atmosphere, a set, and posing in a certain way. Especially in the case of personal photos with family or friends, we want to appear a certain way in them, therefore we put up a performance. In that sense, we can think of photography as a way in which we commodify our private lives as well. Our birthdays, holidays and leisure activities virtually become a product for tech companies. Essentially, the technological development of photography is highly connected with the rise of marketing and advertising, the commodification and standardization of production processes and professional equipment. We can clearly observe this in the age of smart phones and social media where anything at any given moment can be photographed and become content or a commodity for the media company of your preference. In the case of One Hour Photo (2002), the private sphere is commodified by the tech companies who mass produce cameras, films, photo papers and other photo equipment. This considered, I don’t think that a substantial amount of One Hour Photo being set in a mall is a coincidence at all. There is an emphasis on mass consumption,trying to achieve a certain lifestyle via consumption and how this performance is essentially an illusion. The Yorkins shop a lot, they are at the mall a lot. During the scene where Nina and Will are having an argument, it is communicated to us that Nina’s shopaholic tendencies to create a perfect magazine like life is essentially to compensate for the fact that Will is an absentee father and husband. Similarly, Sy tries to buy the Yorkins’ love multiple times; usually via giving their son gifts, which in the end costs him his job and leads him to nowhere. Finally, in Sy’s nightmares we see the mall completely devoid of any products, looking empty, eerie and unsettling, once again emphasizing the vanity of consumerist and performative culture. A similar conflict of illusion vs. reality showcases itself in the case of photos as well; further adding to the portrayal of photos as performative commodities.
This dichotomy makes sense in historical context as well. Considering that 2001 was a year of recession, it is possible that the disillusionment with the market economy, capitalism and consumption culture has found itself in this movie; especially considering that the 90s were the years of economic boom, when consumer spending skyrocketed. That too came crumbling down like an illusion with the 2001 bubble burst.
Another interesting dynamic about photography that One Hour Photo (2002) brings into our attention is the power relation that it creates between the viewer and the viewed. Photography is unique in the sense that the viewed party who are made visible through photography have varying degrees of control over the production and distribution of their pictures. This creates an asymmetrical power relation between those who are photographed and the photographers. Sy is the "sovereign viewer", in a sense. The film also clearly materializes this power relation between the viewer and the viewed by literally weaponizing the camera and showcasing the amount of power and entitlement someone can accumulate simply by the act of voyeurism. Somewhat ahead of its time in terms of the themes it dwells upon I think.