Photographer discusses reaction to Vanity Fair portraits of Trump staffers Susie Wiles, JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt
Shane O’Neill
On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a two-part story by Chris Whipple about the inner circle of President Donald Trump’s staff, featuring unusually candid conversations with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. It also featured remarkably unvarnished portraits of Wiles, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Karoline Leavitt, all photographed by Christopher Anderson.
Whipple’s story has made waves on social media and in Washington, where Wiles’ allies have rushed to her defence. Anderson’s portraits – particularly his extreme close-ups that show his subjects’ faces in minute topographical detail – have also caused a stir among people on both sides of the American political divide.
We caught Anderson by phone at the airport in Paris – where he was about to board a flight to Munich for another shoot – to ask him about the outsize online reaction to his recent photographs and the process behind them.
This interview was condensed and edited for length and clarity.
I want to talk to you about the portraits that you did for Vanity Fair. As I assume you have heard, they’ve caused a bit of a splash on social media. Can you tell me how you conceived of them?
I conceived of it many years ago. I did a whole book of American politics called Stump (2014), where I did all close-ups. It was my attempt to circumnavigate the stage-managed image of politics and cut through the image that the public relations team wants to be presented, and get at something that feels more revealing about the theatre of politics. It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time. I have done it to all sides of the political spectrum, not just Republicans. It’s part of how I think about portraiture in a lot of ways: close, intimate, revealing.
How do you prepare a subject for it? Obviously your portfolio is available online, but do they know they’re signing up for an extreme close-up?
Obviously not every picture I make is a tight close-up, and not all the pictures that I made at the White House were the tight close-ups. As we’re doing the portrait session I do a little bit of everything: I’m switching cameras, I am switching lenses. At one point I was so close to Susie Wiles that she said, with a very serious voice, “You’re too close”, and I backed up a bit. I am getting physically close to them when I do that. In fact, I photographed Trump at the beginning of his first presidency. And it was the cover of The New York Times Magazine. It’s also an extreme close portrait of him.
The images are really arresting. What is your response to people who say that these images are unfair? There’s been a lot of attention about Karoline Leavitt’s lips and [what appear to be] injection sites.
I didn’t put the injection sites on her. People seem to be shocked that I didn’t use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things.
Specifically in the context of Vanity Fair, though, where the prevailing aesthetic is creamy and dreamy, it stands out.
Vanity Fair is a magazine that has its feet in two worlds, right? One is the journalism world, and one is the celebrity entertainment machine. Obviously celebrity portraits on the cover of Vanity Fair are not really about journalism in the way that you and I think about journalism. But then there’s the other side of Vanity Fair, which is real journalism. I’m surprised that a journalist would even need to ask me the question of “Why didn’t I retouch out the blemishes?” Because if I had, that would be a lie. I would be hiding the truth of what I saw there.
It’s an interesting situation, though, when it is what you’re expecting to see. Some people are reading this as being an attack or being petty.
If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it, and make them look better than they look? And I would also repeat: this has been a fixture of my work for many years. I’ve photographed all political stripes just like this. You will find in my book pictures of Barack Obama, Michelle Obama – beloved figures on the left – photographed in the same way. The truth is: I was sceptical about this assignment to begin with. I make my living as a celebrity photographer now and I didn’t feel that I could go into that [political] context doing my celebrity photographer thing. And I was assured that was not the job. My job is to go in and draw on my experience as a journalist and photograph what I see. I go in not with the mission of making someone look good or bad. Whether anyone believes me or not, that is not what my objective is. I go in wanting to make an image that truthfully portrays what I witnessed at the moment that I had that encounter with the subject.
Were they coming camera-ready or was there a hair-and-make-up team?
Most of them came camera-ready or with their own hair-and-make-up team. Karoline Leavitt has her own personal groomer that was there.
I mean, we don’t know if Leavitt still has that groomer today, now that the photos are published.
Well, what can I say? That’s the make-up that she puts on, those are the injections she gave herself. If they show up in a photo, what do you want me to say? I don’t know if it says something about the world we live in, the age of Photoshop, the age of AI filters on your Instagram, but the fact that the internet is freaking out because they’re seeing real photos and not retouched ones says something to me.
I thought it was interesting that Leavitt’s defence of Susie Wiles has been “Everything was taken out of context”. The extreme close-up divorces faces from context as well. What’s your response to that?
Does not seeing the beige wall behind them take them out of context? I’m not sure. Everything that’s in the frame is what I choose to keep in the frame. For me, in the case of close-ups, I am trying to eliminate certain information so that other information is easier to read.
Were there moments that you missed? Anything that happened that’s on the cutting-room floor?
I don’t think there’s anything I missed that I wish I’d gotten. I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then, when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
The Washington Post
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