Last week, the world was stunned as reality TV star Kim Kardashian revealed her famous bottom and other bits glazed in oil on the front cover of PAPER magazine claiming that she 'broke the internet'..but what exactly is behind the idea of this provocative shoot?The shoot itself was a recreation of the 1976 images known as 'The Champagne Incident' featuring black model Carolina Beamont by photographer Jean-Paul Goude.
The 'champagne' photo was part of a larger photo book titled "Jungle Fever", that fetishized Black women and sometimes made their bodies appear animalistic. Goude had a sort of obsession with Black women, which perpetuated the ideals that Black women’s bodies were objects. Author of "Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture," Janell Hobson notes that in one part of "Jungle Fever", Goude compares the backsides of Black women to those of "race horses".Kim received a lot of backlash against the recreation of the image, with people stating that it was a disrespectful and distasteful recreation of what the original image stood for. So why did Jean-Paul Goude recreate it? I feel that Jean-Paul has recreated the image to bring it up to date and modernise an old image that few people knew about up until now to something that we will all be talking about for a while. Without the realise of the Kim Kardashian images, no one would have really known about the 1976 original images and what they stood for, so by recreating them Jean-Paul Goude has almost re-released the original at the same time and has managed to get people talking about what the actual idea behind the image is-this being something that as a photographer, he had a great desire and interest in..It is almost as though he has used Kim Kardashian as a way to get people talking about himself and to become more involved with his previous, more meaningful work.
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