Perez Hilton, the screen name for Mario Lavandeira, the reigning online gossip maven who runs PerezHilton.com, prides himself on the sensitivity of his readings of photographs. “I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”
He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”
