Celebrity, Commodification and Photography

This book explores the commodification of celebrity culture. It argues that the manner of representing celebrities in heat magazine is supportive of consumerism and capitalist ideology. Quantitative and qualitative research methods, mainly content and textual analysis, and were employed to determine how celebrity culture is represented in heat. Through the analysis of photographic images, the research revealed that celebrity culture was represented in two ways. Firstly, it is a Western-led cultural phenomenon, evidenced by the dominance of American and British celebrities. Secondly, celebrity culture is represented in a contradictory manner as the split between the private self and the public persona. This contradictory nature of celebrity is aimed at exposing the fallacy of the manufactured nature of celebrity culture as a creation of the celebrity industries. Therefore the deconstruction of the celebrity image pervades the content of heat. On the other hand, the veneration of the celebrity image is resurrected within heat, thereby perpetuating the social obsession with celebrities and reinforcing a culture of consumerism.