Wide-eyed gazes and blotchy skin. Plump lips and powdery make-up. Extreme close-ups of President Trump’s inner circle — including Karoline Leavitt, Susie Wiles, JD Vance and Marco Rubio — have set the internet alight since leaving the bounds of Vanity Fair and its bombshell White House tell-all yesterday.
It’s not hard to see why. The unvarnished look at some of the most powerful people in the country is an increasingly rare sight. With Leavitt, for instance, the White House press secretary is most often seen at the same even distance from the camera and, by extension, the American public.
The photographs were taken by photojournalist Christopher Anderson to accompany a major two-part story by reporter Chris Whipple based on a year’s worth of candid interviews (to say the least) with Wiles, the White House chief of staff. Anderson’s portraits of key members of President Donald Trump’s second administration oscillated between pulled-back and formal, and in-your-face and unsettling. In an age of vast PR teams and careful image crafting, how did this get through?
You might think it unusual, but this is work that Anderson has done for more than two decades, using his camera to show the facade and theater of politics across multiple administrations.
Anderson started out with the agency Magnum Photos as a conflict photographer, but his portraits of US politics gained attention in the late 2000s as well, when his gritty, claustrophobic black-and-white portraits of politicians on the campaign trail filled the pages of the New York Times Magazine, blemishes and all. His book “Stump,” published in 2014, revisited those images on more neutral ground, presenting images of Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Chris Christie, Joe Biden and Condoleezza Rice, among others, without journalistic text or the usual indicators of his subjects’ political affiliations. He’s called them his “X-ray icons,” according to Magnum, getting at what’s beneath the surface of American politics. Whether in black and white or color, that idea has continued as a steady throughline across his photographic career.
The high-flash, unrelenting style of photojournalism seen in some of Anderson’s work was readily embraced by photo editors in the 2010s, as they looked for images to match a political landscape that was becoming more dramatic. Major publications including the New York Times, New York Magazine and TIME sought out Anderson’s unguarded portraits of political figures, as well the work of his peers: Mark Peterson’s shadowy portraits of a menacing Sarah Palin on the mic or blank-gazed Hillary Clinton with a finger to her lips; or the intensity of Dina Litovsky’s studies of larger-than-life personalities at political rallies. The style hasn’t just been limited to campaign trail reporting, but has spread to stories on fashion, debutante balls — and even dog shows.
Anderson has said he trains his lens on everyone equally, regardless of political party. Looking back across his work, it’s fair to say that he approaches both major parties with the same incisive eye, though some characters in the wider cast of American politics have escaped his camera more unscathed than others. Anderson’s point isn’t to take unflattering portraits, and his style can change up even within the same shoot. The more traditional portraits of Wiles & co. within the Vanity Fair reports went unremarked on, as uncontroversial things do. As a photojournalist, he’s also not in charge of how his subjects present themselves, who their makeup artists are, or when they might be booking cosmetic procedures. Unlike a commercial photographer who might smooth out every imperfection, his job is to reveal, not conceal.
The Vanity Fair story has been the talk of Washington, from Wiles’ comments that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality” to her revelation that he has been pushing for regime change in Venezuela. Both the interview and Anderson’s photographs feel particularly incongruent to an administration that has long made clear its preference for friendly media, limiting access to the White House and Pentagon for some traditional mainstream outlets. Still, Trump and his wider administration have been known to sit down with (and call up) major outlets, a constant dance between bashing the media and craving the legitimacy it provides.
President Trump has also applied pressure over unflattering photographs and paintings, lobbing criticism at a recent Time magazine cover, which showed the sun through his wispy hair, as well as a painter who didn’t quite capture his likeness in the Colorado State Capitol. A week later, Time released a second cover, and Trump was appeased with a new painting. But it sets a dangerous precedent for a presidential administration to wield influence over images that offend it. The public shouldn’t only see the mask.
