Vogue Magazine, a Confession, and the Confused Artistry of Annie Leibovitz
March 22, 2008 by IrishSpacemonk
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:
(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
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I have two points to make that are not ideas or theories.
1: Your very correct and true about the poor photoshop that took place on this cover, they are put together and is impossible to do that
in real time.
2: Your wrong about the idea of racism and totally off on the idea
that Annie had a vision of king kong during these images. If you open the magazine and look through the pages you will see other images that Annie shot of other women and athletes as well as a African american sprinter (women) holding an American Flag… can you read into these images.. What about the big discus thrower hucking a women in the air… Maybe white men should be upset for stereotyping us as abusive pigs who are white trash maybe?? If Shaun white was on the cover
with next to super tall model, this would be a slam to all short men in the universe and how could Vogue be so insensitive to people who are short and make them look weak frail next to such a stunning model who towers over him… this is obviously a idea taken directly from the movie “Shrek”!! Get over your lack of knowledge to understand that Lebron James is a giant athlete that has a vicious roar and has a huge presence and energy on and off the court that is greatly and captured in this image.. Do you want one of the greatest athletes to be in nice suit holding a kitty cat and some roses on the cover? Stop trying to reading into things more the people who create.
Thanks Chad - I’m impressed you read my entirely too long of a post. However I think you’re coming at this with a completely misinformed, but very post-modern perspective. Being a designer, illustrator, photographer, and basic dealer in images myself, it’s my responsibility to understand the historical context of images that I use, and the context of which I reuse images. Look at Annie’s latest work. It involves a lot of Photoshopped images that reconfigure famous scenes into modern scenarios. She wasn’t born yesterday. And so given her professional experience I feel safe in assuming she’d seen the King Kong poster before.
And I’m also not the kind of person that randomly draws these sort of parallels to make a far-left liberal point. My point is, if I were in an academic setting and I presented this photo composition as my cover design, I’d be labeled as ignorant of the racial connotations it contains. And the only reason this made it to the cover is that in the public sphere, there is still a large audience that says, “racists? so what. LeBron’s a cool dude…as long as he doesn’t date my daughter, or try to run for president, or try to manage a Fortune 500 company….”
The fact you refer to Shrek! is quite fascinating, because it reveals how poorly racial stereotyping has been taught in school.
So Chad, my suggestion to you would be to keep coming back, reading my long posts, or checking out my cartoons. And you might also study up on some of the topics surrounding media…topics not taught by Pixar and Disney.
by highlighting the racist characteristics of the picture, ur only giving racism and this racial division more acknowledgement. i looked at the picture, and saw a man who is at the top of the nba, a king kong like figure some might even say, holding a beautiful model.
moral of the story? ur dumb.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Seriously, I am FAR more worried about how unbelievably thin-skinned we have have become and how quick we are to brand those we dislike as being guilty of “wrong-think” (a condition requiring re-education, I’m sure) than I am with whether or not some photo bears a (barely) passing resemblance to some other photo. Send me any pic you wish with a minority in it and I’d be willing to bet that given the time and the motivation, I could find a racist connection somewhere. Thing is, I have neither the time nor the motivation to do so.
I’m not sure what kind of person needs to find racism EVERYWHERE they look, but it makes me sad that you’re one of them.
I’d love to claim credit as the first that highlighted the simularities between these pictures. Unfortunately I wasn’t. Do a quick Google search and you’ll find there are many that find this sort of work offensive. My article had much more to do with creative arrogance - that an “artist” can be above this responsibility - when in fact they owe it to society to be more educated. So I guess that makes me a dumb Irish.
BTW Evilroy - I’m glad you found the motivation and time to read this piece. It’ll take some time, but hopefully it’ll sink in.
Awesome job. I love the points you’ve made and can clearly see the views from which you come.
But I have to wonder if the King-Kong recreation was just to make LeBron seem even more manly and beastly, despite his color? That’s what immediately jumped into my head. Though in this case it would be making the point that Gisele is fragile and unable to protect herself, which would just be jumping to sexism.
Anyways, I enjoyed your post.
Maria, thanks. I should say I’m typically pretty skeptical about seeing too much into anything. That was originally the motivation behind my confession of artistic arrogance.
Not knowing the connection between the photograph and King Kong beforehand, I just thought it was a dumb, contrived cover: Gisele being hit by a bizarre gust of wind that has singled her out as its sole target while LeBron James dribbles a basketball and howls like he just passed a gall stone? That’s not good by any stretch of the imagination.
In its intended context w/LeBron as King Kong, yes, I think that’s racist, as obviously you would never see a white basketball player in the same situation. It cannot be avoided that she is making a direct comparison between a giant, angry ape and a black man. Maybe the comparison is more particular to large, black atheletes and not just blacks in general. Even so, I doubt that all large, black athletes would like being compared to apes. Maybe she’s just comparing LeBron James to a big, hairy ape, in which case…LeBron? Have you no dignity? Though, to his defense, it could be fun to pretend to be an ape for everyone.
If there were a species of white gorilla, we could easily be dealing with pictures of burly white men in gorilla poses. But the fact is that there isn’t such a species, and I would certainly never make the comparison between a black man and an ape. I mean, what if I walked around with a homemade shirt of LeBron James’ face superimposed on a gorilla? Or a shirt that said LeBron James = A Gorilla?
I hate to say it, but while you’re dead-on about the quality of the photoshopping, you’re way off on the King Kong angle. I’m not trying to call you a racist by any means, but my first thought when I saw your comparison was that you were projecting your thoughts.
You made that mental connection and rather than admit to the subconscious racism that everybody has a little bit of, you rallied against the artist who created that image. Hell, you see that all the time with priests or evangelists who speak out against homosexuality only to be exposed for a prolonged affair with a tranny.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Yeah Paul you make a lot of sense. This Irish Spacemonk is harboring deep subconscious racism…?
I’m sorry - take some time and study black history and the history of media and you’ll be more enlightened. You are in fact correct, that at one time I would have looked at this cover and thought nothing of it, but one great benefit of getting an education beyond just the coursework to obtain a paying job, is the ability to see other points of view. But if your point is that being aware of the history of imagery is bad, I can’t go along with that.
I never said deep, but subconscious, yeah it definitely seems that way. You’ve got it, I’ve got it, I don’t think there’s a person alive who at least on a subconscious level doesn’t make a judgement of somebody based on their appearance (blind people maybe).
You saw the image, you made the Kong connection. If others out there have written articles drawing the same conclusion, that doesn’t mean that any of the articles or writers are correct, it just means that you all thought along the same lines.
Just because you are educated as to the use of imagery and the allusion to their intents doesn’t mean your interpretation is going to be perfect. The photographer set out to contrast a rough and tough sports guy with a pretty model. In spite of, or perhaps because of studying media, you saw a darker agenda, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
Manson thought “Helter Skelter” was describing a race war. He knew plenty about racism, but he knew nothing about music appreciation it seems. Sorry to throw you in with Charley, but the example fits.
Lest you still think I’m calling you a card-carrying klansman, rest assured, I’m not. I’m not by any means saying that you are a racist. You saw Lebron, and you made the association to the Kong poster with a not very similar pose. I’m just saying that like Chuck, the Kong connection, and it’s intent as racist imagery is in this case in the eye of the beholder.
Wow Paul. First I’m racist (well not really) and now I’m in company with Charley (well not really that either). You sound either like you work for Hillary Clinton or Ron Paul. Well, I’m going to let you have the last word on this to avoid being lumped in with Osama or Saddam next round ‘cuz my blog is un-American (meaning a slightly left-leaning point of view). Of course this line of reasoning is only obvious to myself.
Best luck and eat plenty of clover.
My dear
NathanIrishspacemonk,No need to pout. You posted an article and invited people to comment on it. I’m commenting. Now that you don’t have a counterpoint to the points I’ve made you’re getting all upset?
Just because you can’t convince me or half the other readers that Annie Leibovitz is out to destroy Lebron James is no reason to take your ball and go home. Convince me. Again, I never said you were a racist, just that you have some racial thoughts and rather than admit that you’re human, you put the blame on somebody else. It’s OK, it’s not your fault, she was asking for it.
My political leanings (irrelevant, but if you must know) are definitely not in tune with either of the Clinton brothers nor with Ron Paul. Why you desperately need to bring that into the picture I don’t know.
I mean, if Lebron and Gisele were climbing a building, or if his other arm was raised up I could see your point. Hell, he just has his arm around her, it’s not like he’s depicted as holding her up or even supporting her weight at all. You made that point yourself in pointing out the shoddy Photoshopping.
Again, I’m not sure where the Un-American statement comes from. Putting out a message, no matter how misguided is one of our most important rights, so in that sense I find your article and what it set out to do as a very American thing. The gentlemanly debate that I tried to engage you in is a likewise American act.
We’re all allowed to discuss our points of view without fear of persecution. If you are unable to defend your point of view with actual counter-points, it’s your right as an American to make snarky comments about the other persons political stance. Just because you can’t seem to defend your stance doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong either. It’s entirely possible that Ms Leibovitz will show up on the news tomorrow and make a plea for ethnic cleansing. Nobody but her knows her true agenda.
You’re allowed to make accusations towards her. I’m allowed to disagree. This country is great eh?
Sorry had to strike the “Nathan” as no one calls me that except close family.
Heh I’m enjoying the debate. But I’m not sure I can in a single post move your current position that, except in blatant copies of racist stereotyping, an image is free from social responsibility. So I’m going to only ask for step - is there agreement that King Kong and the 1933 movie poster is racist?
From my perspective, the answer is yes.
Everyone else can make the determination if the Leibovitz’s photograph bears any resemblance.
BTW I take that I’m snarky to be a compliment. Thanks.
Ahhh debate, see we can talk after all. Thanks for letting me have the last word by the way.
OK, I’ll bite. Does the original King Kong poster and film contain racist imagery? Yes and no. Yes, in that as written it probably was intended to be a cautionary tale against integration. No, in that if you show that movie to a child (race or creed is up to you) and show them the movie, it’s just a story about a big ape. So there’s the intent of the message, but there’s also the interpretation on the receivers part.
Does the magazine cover resemble the movie poster? Not from my perspective, but I can see how somebody with the right bias or agenda could draw that correlation.
Oh, and take snarky however you’d like. It wasn’t ever meant to be an insult. I just tend to call a spade a spade. Oh wait, I mean I call a small gardening shovel a small gardening shovel.
I win.
I find some of these comments interesting. Especially the ones criticizing the article for bringing attention to the racist tone of the magazine cover. Or as Chainsaw so eloquently put it: “ur only giving racism and this racial division more acknowledgement.”
Since when has awareness been a bad thing? And what’s the alternative solution if pointing it out is considered bad? Ignore it and it’ll go away?
Also, I’m currently in school for art myself. One thing that always comes up that every art student has to deal with is answering for their work. Owning up to the subject matter. Thinking it through and keeping yourself informed. Doing something because “it looks cool” or because of shock value is a cop out.
Let’s just say hypothetically that the King Kong poster wasn’t the theme of the cover. I honestly don’t know, I haven’t picked up that issue. But that’s beside the point. How do you honestly look at your work objectively and not see the stereotypes at play if you’re the one putting your creative energy behind this project.
If it were me and I were to have my work circulated on a national level, I’d be cross referencing and be in on the conceptual process from the get go before putting my name on it. Granted mistakes do happen, not doing so is creatively and intellectually irresponsible.
And as a side note, there’s racism and sexism everywhere. It may not be as blatant as it was 50 years ago, but it’s there. And yes, you could make a strong case for both in this cover.
Also I’d like to add this (apologies for the excessively long comments, this just happened to strike a nerve I guess):
Paul was mentioning the notion that everyone has these “racial thoughts”. Know what, I agree. Everyone has their preconceived prejudices of other people. It doesn’t matter if you’re a klansman or a or a civil rights attorney. Really, Paul was just stating the obvious.
Unless you acknowledge it and bring it up and make people aware of it, it doesn’t get any better. It’ll never go completely away. The key to doing that productively is to talk about it like mature human beings.
Erica - the greatest compliment to a blog post are non-SPAM comments, so no reason to apologize, plus you make some great points, especially about how issues of racism and sexism are treated (or exploited for entertainment) everywhere. In fact it’s within the world of fashion that sexism is king.
Hmmm…might be an interesting future article there.
By the way, good luck in art school.
Great post. I see your points clearly. I’m glad you pushed a few buttons on racism. Touché. It’s time we looked at the insidiousness of this illness in our culture, especially from the left. (Me too. I’m a dumb Irish American artist/designer) I think in our political correctness, we’ve become blind to how racist our culture actually is. I also agree that the cover is crap. Come on Vanity Fair… you had budget to hire Liebowitz, don’t fake it.
Credo Quia Absurdum.
Terri - you have some great art.
And I hope other got my point that it’s not necessarily the publics responsibility to be educated as much as it’s important for creative individuals that make imagery that enters to the public - that’s where the responsibility lies.
Terri, I think you said something that makes me curious:
Was it Leibovitz who put the images together? Or, was is contrived by the people designing the issue. She may have been following orders too.
I’m not trying to liberate Leibovitz from responsibility, but I am curious if it was her idea.