NYO: more from the Survey

Profile on Annie Leibovitz
Hey look! She's sold out!
(Hey look! That doesn't matter at all when it comes to selling cover images on the newsstand!)

So in middle school I subscribed to Vanity Fair because I loved Leibovitz's photography. But for some reason, it's become crystal clear over the years that lately, she's been phoning it in. It's my own little amusement to see new covers she creates (like Aprils' VF with Sara Silverman on the cover)

What's going on in Annie's mind:

hmmmm....we've got celebrities, but not 'real' celebrities....I mean these cnts are no George Clooney or Leonardo DiCaprio.....so i know! let's put them in costumes! YES! I'll go for whimsical! The light, whimsical comedy stylings of Sara Silverman.....and then I'll have my intern play with the levels until they seem even whiter that white because I'm a big racists and that's all I think about when i set up photo shoots.


That was fun, I should try being other people more often and see how much trouble I can get in....but back to the article. There were some pretty funny quotes throughout:

“The truth is, I thought I was doing journalism, but I really wasn’t,” Ms. Leibovitz told Powell’s Books in 1999. “When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that’s what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. What became important was to have a point of view.”

Glad to know journalists are completely blank slates without their own agendas.

Around the same time, she told The Times: “There’s a lot of things that have taken over over the years that weren’t there when I started. They need to sell the magazine. … The cover probably feels more like advertising than anything else.”

Sounds like SOMEONE read my masters thesis.....cash money.

And of course how could the article get away with NOT mentioning the lovely non-controversy that is the Vogue cover. (Please that's so last week...check my archives!)

And there was LeBron James, on the cover of this April’s Vogue, hustling both a ball and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen in either an unlikely conscious homage to 75-year-old imagery of King Kong or in just, say, a randomly discovered, formally pleasing, overly lit and magazine-friendly arrangement of the human figures that so happened to have been negotiated for cover placement and that, among all the shots taken, tested best among women of a certain age bracket that had been recently gathered in some horrible room with no exterior windows in a mall.

I have a feeling this comment is going to get a lot of slack from the other blogs. Let's break it down:

"Randomly discovered,"
Please. Leibovitz is all about stealing from archaic photographs.

"formally pleasing, overly lit and magazine-friendly arrangement of human figures"
Because an animal-like yell is oh-so-friendly and typical image to the UpperEastSiders wanting to discover if OvalSkirts are the new SkinnyJeans.

"...tested best among women of a certain age bracket that had beenrecently gathered in some horrible room with no exterior windows in a mall"
The day Anna Wintour does a focus group in a mall is the day magazines truly die.