In 1961, Life magazine featured two pages of photographs documenting Muhammad Ali's underwater training regime. In the pictures, taken by Flip Schulke, the young fighter ducked and feinted, the bubbles in the swimming pool following the arc of his arm.
Only one problem: It was all a big, fat fib. Ali never trained underwater -- at that point he couldn't even swim. However, what he lacked in aquatic skill he made up for in media savvy, and he was desperate to get into the hugely popular Life, knowing it would give him worldwide exposure. Ali and his trainer Angelo Dundee cooked up the idea of the fighter training underwater -- perhaps this is where Rocky got the idea to pummel frozen sides of beef -- and the editors of Life fell for it.
The Ali photos are part of a fascinating new exhibit called The World's Most Photographed, which has just opened at London's National Portrait Gallery. The show takes 10 of the most familiar faces from the photographic age, from Queen Victoria to Gandhi to Greta Garbo and Adolf Hitler, and shows how they manipulated their images in order to further their aims, whether political or artistic or megalomaniacal. Some of the images haven't been seen anywhere in decades. A picture of Ali leaning back in a rocking chair had been forgotten in photographer Bill Peronneau's drawer for 20 years.
James Dean's goals, like Ali's, were self-serving: He was panting to get into Life magazine. His first efforts, a 1954 collaboration with photographer Roy Schatt, proved futile. The editors at Life, while they liked the atmospheric shots of Dean in New York bars and clubs, found them -- how to put this delicately -- a little too gay. They asked for something that showed "a more masculine side," and a year later Dean returned to the town of his youth, Fairmont, Ind., with photographer Dennis Stock, to take some butch shots set against the heartland.
There Stock also took a ghoulish series of pictures that were suppressed for more than 30 years. They're hanging in the National Gallery now, a grim memento mori: The pictures show Dean goofing around in an open casket in Hunt's Funeral Parlour, where a couple of months later his body would rest after his fatal car crash.
A photo of Elvis fixing his hair in a hand-held mirror shows the performer at a watershed moment in his career. Before 1956, Elvis had been a wild-looking, hedonistic country boy. That year, Colonel Tom Parker clamped down on the number of photographers who were allowed to take Elvis's picture and polished his image for public consumption.
Other stars exhibited little guile. "I looked very hard for bad pictures of Audrey Hepburn, but there weren't any," says the show's curator, Robin Muir, adding that Hepburn was one star who didn't need to manipulate her image because her innate goodness shone through.
Even more intriguing are the political figures in the exhibition, who showed, even as photography was an infant, a remarkable understanding of the new medium's power. Queen Victoria, who is presented not only in her standard "not amused" guise but also beaming with her grandchildren, was one such canny monarch. "I'd always assumed that Victoria would think of photography as an intriguing novelty," says Muir. "But she and Prince Albert were incredible patrons of the new art, and realized how images of Victoria could bind her to her people." In 1860, the American photographer John Mayall took a portrait of the Queen, and 60,000 were sold in the first week.
Victoria, while reasonably free of personal vanity ("God knows," she wrote to one of her daughters, "there is nothing to admire in my ugly old person") was still given the treatment starlets would demand in the future, with her photographs carefully retouched. One portrait of the Royal family will be familiar to anyone who has a touchy relative.
The Queen, horrified by an unflattering image of herself with her eyes closed, has scratched her face off the photo.
She was one of the first public figures to realize how an image can come back to bite you on the bustle. Her subjects longed for a fresh image of their Queen during her long seclusion after Albert's death. When a picture was released, it showed her servant John Brown holding the reins of her horse in a seemingly familiar way, and Victorian tongues were set wagging.
By contrast, even John F. Kennedy's most flagrant dalliances were kept far from the public eye. When an outraged photographer, Florence Kater, shot a picture of JFK leaving a girlfriend's apartment, she sent the photo around Washington, but no one would touch it. Can you imagine the same thing happening in the age of Matt Drudge and Fox News?
What Kennedy was exceedingly good at was presenting himself as "fit, able-bodied and ready to lead the country," says Muir. One photograph by Orlando Suero shows him in a familiar pose, hurling a football down a Washington street, while a beautifully turned-out Jackie looks on. As Muir points out, if you look closely, you can see under his sweater the outline of the back brace that kept Kennedy upright through crippling pain. The official portrait of the president-elect, taken by Irving Penn, shows him in a folksy, all-American rocking chair. In fact, says Muir, the chair was not an antique from the Eastern seaboard, but specially designed to give Kennedy some relief when sitting down.
One of the photographers who came to have the closest relationship with Kennedy -- he took the famous picture of the president leaning over his desk in silhouette -- was Jacques Lowe. Their relationship started badly when Lowe showed up unannounced to photograph the young politician and his family, but became close as Kennedy grew to trust him.
Unfortunately, some of the Lowe prints in the Portrait Gallery show are the only ones still existing. The late photographer's negatives were kept in a vault in the World Trade Centre. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the vault was found open and empty, and the negatives have never been recovered.
Perhaps the last word should go to Mahatma Gandhi, who understood better than most the symbolic weight of images.
When he went to meet King George V wearing nothing but his usual loincloth and wrap, a reporter asked if he shouldn't have worn something more appropriate. Gandhi replied, "His majesty had more than enough on for the both of us."
The World's Most Photographed is at the National Portrait Gallery, St. Martin's Place, London, until Oct. 23.