Vogue Magazine, a Confession, and the Confused Artistry of Annie Leibovitz
March 22, 2008
I’m in the checkout line at Safeway with two beers and shaving cream and I notice the latest issue of Vogue.
Is this for real?
With all of the uproar over race, racism, and a media that keeps picking at the scab, how could such an insensitive cover make the stands?
I left the checkout with two beers, shaving cream and the April edition of Vogue, and a bit of fire for the keyboard with three points to make.
First point. If you’re a photographer, and your going to rely on Photoshop to pull off your ill-conceived gig, do it right.
I’m a graphic designer by trade and not a physicist, but I’m pretty convinced the cover image is a mediocre Photoshop job ( please comment if you feel otherwise.) One of the tell-tale signs of a manipulated image versus the real deal is gravity - the way bodies press against objects, or folds and light shadows bend and fall. In this photo, Gisele is weightless. While I know 99% of us couldn’t even dream of doing what Lebron does on the court, try to do what he’s doing in this photo. Even LeBron couldn’t pull this off.
First, find someone about half your weight and who is comfortable running suspended in your left arm. (It also helps if they don’t have a right arm.)
Now grab a basketball and assume a pose that goes somewhat like this. You’re in a wide stance and dribbling the basketball. Your left foot, (the same side as you’ll be holding whomever you convinced to play Gisele), hovers a few inches off the ground. Your Gisele should now assume the running pose in your left arm. Keep dribbling the basketball with your right. Now as Gisele fakes running, casually keep her restrained.
Keep this pose while I ready my camera.
Now comes the tough part. Roar at the camera. Don’t say cheese. That’s too wimpy. Make this a deep roar from the depths of your being, all the while looking straight at the camera and dribbling the basketball.
Oh, and Gisele, while you’re running, levitating and being restrained, give us a goofy smile and look somewhere way up in the rafters just over my left shoulder.
I hope you get my point. This cover is a concoction, and one of the worst kind, because it takes it’s influence from a movie, King Kong (1933), with a long history of controversy over it’s racist innuendo, and places it smack dab between my beer and shaving cream. Lesson here: If you’re going to concoct, know how to mix your ingredients.
This brings me to point two, a confession on creative arrogance.
Artists deal in manipulation of images. We see, process, and then regurgitate in whatever medium we prefer with the hope that others see what we see. From the moment we’re born, images are coming in, embedding themselves in our subconscious. And herein lies the problem. No two people have ever been exposed to the exact set of images, or reality.
In college, after I changed my major from Marketing and decided to dive head first into the process of becoming an Artist, I created art under the concept of shock first, question later. The unconscious intrigued me. Juxtaposition without reason, became reason itself. This was 1995 and I’d created a painting that stirred people, angered people. This is a painting for which I’m not proud. But at the time I wouldn’t take any criticism. I said, it’s how the images appeared, I created, I’m stepping back now and I disassociate myself from it. How was I to know what those to symbols meant anything other than my original intention? It’s all ART, right? Wrong. Lesson two: Don’t assume you have no responsibility to self-censorship.
And so I’m going to finish this long soapbox post with my final point.
Annie Leibovitz is a portrait photographer of great fame. At one time we’ve all seen her work. Because of her fame, and the expanse and recognition of her work, I’m going to make some assumptions. First, that she’s smart with a world view and has a great creative perception. That she knows her history of symbols and imagery.
As the photographer for this Vogue cover, Annie knows very much that she’s doing a play on the King Kong movie posters of the 30s (a time when the question of whether racism was ingrained in American life is a mute point). And yet she chose this as the construct for her LeBron and Gisele shot.
Magazine covers don’t spontaneously materialize. They start with a creative concept and a story. They are a collaboration between creative direction, editor, photographer and subject. Leibovitz was given a subject. A black man, a celebrity, and great athlete, and a blond woman, a super model. When the idea was conceived to shoot a photograph in the likes of the King Kong film poster, I’m going to guess this made some on the creative team a bit uneasy, but they went along with it. They were dealing with creative genius, and of course, it’s all in fun. And so the process that would produce this cover started. Leibovitz, thinking she was doing something daring, in the same mold as her photograph of Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk (another photo that could be questioned for its creative intentions), or her Demi Moore pregnant cover for Vanity Fair.
Unfortunately, the imagery and predisposition to make this photograph was already in Leibovitz’s unconscious way before this shot took place. It probably started in childhood with images from the 40s and 50s and has been reinforced all through her life. And her creative arrogance, and the fact she’s likely a politically liberal person with an open mind, means her mind is closed to her own prejudices, that she’s unaware of the myth she continues through her art. The myth that black men are primal brutes, that the blond damsel is their prize. There are a million ways to arrange and photograph two attractive celebrities.
Leibovitz gave us this.
For those interested here’s a list of other commentary on the subject of this Vogue cover:
