From Daily Mail:
The photographer behind Karoline Leavitt’s controversial Vanity Fair shoot has broken his silence on the close-up snap.
Critics slammed the legacy publication for the ‘unflattering’ photos of President Donald Trump’s staff, which were published on Tuesday alongside a bombshell tell-all profile on Chief of Staff Susie Wiles about Trump’s first year in office.
In particular, an extreme close-up of White House Press Secretary Leavitt, 28, sparked immense scrutiny for the outlet, as many accused the publication of being negatively biased towards Trump’s staff in comparison to profiles published about former President Joe Biden.
Photographer Christopher Anderson defended the photo and its publication.
“Very close-up portraiture has been a fixture in a lot of my work over the years,” he said in an interview with The Independent . “Particularly, political portraits that I’ve done over the years. I like the idea of penetrating the theater of politics.”
He said he wasn’t trying to make Leavitt look bad.
“I know there’s a lot to be made with, ‘Oh, he intentionally is trying to make people look bad,’ and that kind of thing – that’s not the case,” he said. “If you look at my photograph work, I’ve done a lot of close-ups in the same style with people of all political stripes.”
Anderson explained why he did not edit the shot of Leavitt.
“I didn’t put the injection sites on her,” he told the Washington Post. “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.
“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’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.
“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.”
Read more at Daily Mail
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