The theft of a photograph leads us to ask what harm might be done to an individual's personality by publication of an unauthorized likeness. The answer to this question depends, in part, on whether the plaintiff is claiming invasion of privacy or violation of the right of publicity. Let us suppose that personality is the form of identity. If this is true, then personality may be conceived as either deep or superficial, depending upon the theory of form we wish to adopt. We right of privacy, which protects personality from unwanted public exposure, presumes that an individual possesses a deeper identity, distinct from his or her sociably defined personality. The right of publicity, in contrast, presumes that commercial exploitation is harmful not because it exposes the underlying personality, but because personality itself is appropriated and exploited. The right of privacy, in other words, accepts the modernist disjunction between form and substance, word and thought, sign and meaning, while the right of publicity accepts the postmodern aesthetic that merges form with substance, representation with reality, and expression with idea. The line between privacy and publicity, however, will not stay drawn because personality both presents the self to the world and protects the self from the world. This ambivalence is evident in the ambiguity of the term from which the word personality is derived, the ''persona.'' The celebrity persona reveals the plaintiff's identity in the form of a unique style and a famous likeness. The same persona, however, may be called upon to serve the plaintiff's privacy interests by deflecting attention from the plaintiff's essential self, thereby concealing that deeper self from public view. Personality is thus both the end of our search for the personal identity of another human being and the beginning of a game where our approach to that identity may be indefinitely deferred.
