Rolling Stone
Sunny Jeong-Eimer
December 8, 1980. The Dakota, New York City. Five shots: four hit, one misses—nonetheless, the four suffice to leave fatal wounds in the back of Yoko Ono’s then-husband John Lennon. Rewind twelve hours and you would find John’s back shot again, only this time instead of bullets, every shot is fired in the form of a camera shutter. The target is shrunken and deprived of eyesight, so helplessly naked in his surrender to the deceptive safety of this premortem photo shoot(ing) that his body regresses into a fetal curl.
Just as the fetus curls inside the womb of its mother, John curls round the frame of his wife, Ono. Her expression betrays the suffocation and boredom of a woman held captive by a society of disciplined social performance; there is apathy held in her gaze which, rather than resting on John, vaguely directs itself beyond him, perhaps toward some distant object of desire unknowable to us, her faceless mass audience. In disinterest, Ono assumes assertive composure. Her arms loosely cross above her head as her hair plumes skyward, simultaneously defying gravity and lengthening her body into something larger than life itself (and its representation). Notably, then, as John shrinks to fit his entire body into the camera’s frame, Ono, in effort to evade photographic capture, is butchered from the waist down. In effect, her legs – a basic anatomical symbol of mobility and dynamism – are eliminated from the representation.
Look closer and the initial mirage of a blissfully in-love celebrity couple gives way to clues of contested relational power. Rather than reciprocate John’s kiss (her face is immobile, trapped by his arms into a one-sided lip-lock) Ono’s lips draw downward as if in quiet protest against this engineered scene of intimacy wherein she plays the exoticized feminine counterpart to John’s effortlessly authoritative white masculinity. After all, it is never John who is Ono’s but always Ono who is John’s. Here, we see a less conventional representation of possession and power. John clings to Ono the way a child stubbornly clings to a stuffed bear, suggesting his disproportionate dependence on her labor: the wively prop on call to accompany his eternal media carousel, the human-turned-site of extraction for anything from sexual/emotional gratification to maternal domestic servitude. . .
Roland Barthes writes that in every photograph there is “that terrible thing [...] the return of the dead.” Intended by the photographer to be a front-cover-friendly testament to Yoko and Lennon’s highly public love life, the image now appears haunted. By the time its publication rolls around, just over a month after Lennon’s assassination, the image ceases to depict the living in more ways than one:
As Ono and Lennon are shot and printed into the hands and gazes of the Other(s), their subjectivities die and reconstitute into pure cultural objects. Of course, this is redundant for the two of them; given their status as a feverishly spectated celebrity couple, they have already undergone this process of death by ferocious photographic operation many times before. Nonetheless, here we see their postured intimacy again crushed into a mass media fantasy that exists outside themselves, one that dually transcends and immortalizes their bodies into corpses suspended in space and time, forever condemned to act out that familiar “funereal immobility” of the Photographic charade.
Ono in print after the fact of John’s death presents us with a more sinister image. Death done them part, Ono is now a widow posing next to the ghost of her husband for the world to see. We witness Barthes’ “glum desert” (20) of mass image culture collide with the facts of mortality and violence, turning the photo past expiration date. . .
I imagine Ono’s isolation during this shoot(ing). Likely the only Asian woman in the room, she must have felt painfully aware that she was posing only as a complementary side-piece to John, a spectacular object to the white photographer and the eventual predominantly white Western audience. I wonder, relative to Ono’s individual expression, where did the photographer’s directed manufacture of spectacle start and end? To what extent is the Ono we see manipulated by the shadows looming behind the camera versus the Ono living before the lens? At any rate, when I view this image, I feel her visceral exhaustion. Through her, I glimpse into that familiar ancestral rage which simmers in the collective consciousness we share as feminized Asian people perpetually wrestling with our given roles as exotic sexual commodities: imported “Oriental” props publicly visible only when we are used to entertain the white colonial cultural imaginary which, in this example, John commands so effortlessly (interestingly, depicted infantilized and pathetic, he still manages to command the spotlight of the image).
Though her rage is muted, it comes through to those who are able to listen and resonate. The smaller intricacies of her expression (assertive posture, apathetic, cold gaze, clothed thus guarded by comparison, etc.) incite a sense of arrested power. Power to transcend past the visual alone and light fire in the One who sits on the other end of the photograph. The One can be you, me, us. One receives the photograph with their arms open with wild abandon, prepared to resurrect from the shot/represented/killed subject a terrible, novel confrontation with what parts of oneself can be found in the Other’s image.
Just as the fetus curls inside the womb of its mother, John curls round the frame of his wife, Ono. Her expression betrays the suffocation and boredom of a woman held captive by a society of disciplined social performance; there is apathy held in her gaze which, rather than resting on John, vaguely directs itself beyond him, perhaps toward some distant object of desire unknowable to us, her faceless mass audience. In disinterest, Ono assumes assertive composure. Her arms loosely cross above her head as her hair plumes skyward, simultaneously defying gravity and lengthening her body into something larger than life itself (and its representation). Notably, then, as John shrinks to fit his entire body into the camera’s frame, Ono, in effort to evade photographic capture, is butchered from the waist down. In effect, her legs – a basic anatomical symbol of mobility and dynamism – are eliminated from the representation.
Look closer and the initial mirage of a blissfully in-love celebrity couple gives way to clues of contested relational power. Rather than reciprocate John’s kiss (her face is immobile, trapped by his arms into a one-sided lip-lock) Ono’s lips draw downward as if in quiet protest against this engineered scene of intimacy wherein she plays the exoticized feminine counterpart to John’s effortlessly authoritative white masculinity. After all, it is never John who is Ono’s but always Ono who is John’s. Here, we see a less conventional representation of possession and power. John clings to Ono the way a child stubbornly clings to a stuffed bear, suggesting his disproportionate dependence on her labor: the wively prop on call to accompany his eternal media carousel, the human-turned-site of extraction for anything from sexual/emotional gratification to maternal domestic servitude. . .
Roland Barthes writes that in every photograph there is “that terrible thing [...] the return of the dead.” Intended by the photographer to be a front-cover-friendly testament to Yoko and Lennon’s highly public love life, the image now appears haunted. By the time its publication rolls around, just over a month after Lennon’s assassination, the image ceases to depict the living in more ways than one:
As Ono and Lennon are shot and printed into the hands and gazes of the Other(s), their subjectivities die and reconstitute into pure cultural objects. Of course, this is redundant for the two of them; given their status as a feverishly spectated celebrity couple, they have already undergone this process of death by ferocious photographic operation many times before. Nonetheless, here we see their postured intimacy again crushed into a mass media fantasy that exists outside themselves, one that dually transcends and immortalizes their bodies into corpses suspended in space and time, forever condemned to act out that familiar “funereal immobility” of the Photographic charade.
Ono in print after the fact of John’s death presents us with a more sinister image. Death done them part, Ono is now a widow posing next to the ghost of her husband for the world to see. We witness Barthes’ “glum desert” (20) of mass image culture collide with the facts of mortality and violence, turning the photo past expiration date. . .
I imagine Ono’s isolation during this shoot(ing). Likely the only Asian woman in the room, she must have felt painfully aware that she was posing only as a complementary side-piece to John, a spectacular object to the white photographer and the eventual predominantly white Western audience. I wonder, relative to Ono’s individual expression, where did the photographer’s directed manufacture of spectacle start and end? To what extent is the Ono we see manipulated by the shadows looming behind the camera versus the Ono living before the lens? At any rate, when I view this image, I feel her visceral exhaustion. Through her, I glimpse into that familiar ancestral rage which simmers in the collective consciousness we share as feminized Asian people perpetually wrestling with our given roles as exotic sexual commodities: imported “Oriental” props publicly visible only when we are used to entertain the white colonial cultural imaginary which, in this example, John commands so effortlessly (interestingly, depicted infantilized and pathetic, he still manages to command the spotlight of the image).
Though her rage is muted, it comes through to those who are able to listen and resonate. The smaller intricacies of her expression (assertive posture, apathetic, cold gaze, clothed thus guarded by comparison, etc.) incite a sense of arrested power. Power to transcend past the visual alone and light fire in the One who sits on the other end of the photograph. The One can be you, me, us. One receives the photograph with their arms open with wild abandon, prepared to resurrect from the shot/represented/killed subject a terrible, novel confrontation with what parts of oneself can be found in the Other’s image.
Sunny (PO '25) is a queer poet & multidisciplinary creator born and raised in Chicago, IL. passionate about exploring storytelling as an avenue to intersectional liberation and self-preservation