“Life is on the record,” Tony Blair’s press chief used to tell his staff. His point was not that it was no longer possible to talk “on background” or that journalists would not respect a confidence. It was that things get out and that it was safer to assume everything you say could be quoted.
I thought of his comment amid news of the Apple hack that has spewed dozens of highly personal images of celebrities on to the internet. The victims include genuine film stars such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Hudson and a number of other women whose celebrity status I guess we’ll just have to take on trust. Those hacked were overwhelmingly women posing nude for pictures presumably taken either by or for their partners.
I write as someone who has never felt the urge to take or circulate nude photographs of myself – a decision that (perhaps worryingly) does not appear to have left a major gap in the life of my partner. Perhaps I should be bothered by this, or perhaps we are products of a different era. Nude photos of a loved one did not begin with the internet. The Polaroid camera built its success on the trend – one model was even known as the Polaroid Swinger and marketed with rather suggestive adverts. The alternative was having photos developed at the local pharmacist, where the leering smile of the shop assistant was enough to dissuade many an amorous couple from posing au naturel.