Vanity Fair has been a magazine for its time, polishing the cult of celebrity to a high gloss, as a new exhibition of its portraiture will attest.
There’s only one magazine in the world that could be behind a photographic exhibition bringing together such disparate names as Albert Einstein, Isadora Duncan, Pablo Picasso, Madonna, Princess Diana and Annie Leibovitz. That magazine is Vanity Fair and the exhibition is Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008, a name that’s accurate, but slightly misleading. It’s not a solid 95 years’ worth of photos but, coinciding with Vanity Fair’s stalled history, half of the 150-plus shots on display were taken between its launch date of 1913 and 1936, the year the magazine folded; the other half from when it relaunched in 1983 until the present.
The gap, however, only enhances the exhibition. “The contrasts between the two halves are interesting,” says Michael Desmond, senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. “There are differences in technology – the contrast between the small black-and-white images of the earlier years with the big colourful ones that come later.”
But more interesting to note, he says, is “the panoply of characters” from the two eras and the differing ways they’re presented. “There is a notion of celebrity or fame in the early years, but the whole notion of celebrity really takes off later.”
Preview some of the Vanity Fair portraits:
Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, June 5-August 30. Website
What’s consistent between the two halves is the emphasis on quality photography, a feature that has always set the magazine apart.
Vanity Fair burst onto New York newsstands just before the beginning of the Jazz Age, when modernism was coming into being and, thanks to the Armory Show (an international exhibition of contemporary art in Manhattan), the first chance for most New Yorkers to clap eyes on the works of avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Duchamp.
It was a magazine for its time, featuring the instigators of all that was new, exciting and innovative about the period, but also using some of the most brilliant artists and photo-graphers to create the striking images for which it became known. Picasso and Brancusi were commissioned to do illustrations; photographers such as Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz took the shots – in the 1920s and ’30s Edward Steichen was paid a fortune to be the magazine’s main
photographer. “From the start, Vanity Fair was conscious of picking an elite group of people to photograph and, equally, to get the best photographers to do it,” says Desmond. “They were acutely aware that it wasn’t just a photograph, but a photograph by, for example, Steichen.”
By the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression, the magazine no longer seemed relevant and eventually closed. But when it resurfaced in the early 1980s, it was again a magazine for its time: a period of great change and optimism, with Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the headlines, the cult of celebrity taking hold, and advertising a form of high art.
Once again, by cultivating a stable of top photographers such as Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier and Helmut Newton (some were from fashion and advertising backgrounds), and with Annie Leibovitz being the Edward Steichen of her day or, as Desmond puts it, “the court painter to important people”,
Vanity Fair would continue to com-mission and publish arresting images.
Many of these images, along with their earlier counterparts, have become modern icons and can be seen in this exhibition from London’s National Portrait Gallery, which reportedly took three years to put together. “In a sense, that’s a reflection of the richness of available photos,” says Desmond. “There would have been tens of thousands to choose from.”
The range of subjects is exceptionally broad – writers HG Wells, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley and Thomas Hardy; composers Milhaud and Stravinsky; artists Augustus John and Frieda Kahlo; pioneering women such as Amelia Earhart, appropriately shot as a tousled adventurer about to step into her aircraft. “Vanity Fair was a champion of feminist issues, they knew their audience. They were determined to be hip and smart, not tied to the 19th century,” says Desmond.
The magazine was also determined to be something of a pioneer itself – to photograph in often quite avant-garde ways (there are some brilliantly bizarre shots of ballet dancers), and to feature “people just before anyone started talking about them”.
A shot of a contemplative Einstein surrounded by books, for instance, was published in 1923. “He was still in Germany at the time – he’d published his theory of relativity in 1905, but only a few scientists knew about it,” says Desmond. Vanity Fair was the first mainstream magazine to bring the scientist to the wider population’s attention, well before E=mc² became the world’s most famous equation.
It wasn’t all about intellect and high art, though. The launch of the magazine in 1913 coincided with the growing popularity of cinema. “Everyone was churning out films by the week and it was virtually the first time you could be a film star.” The pages of the magazine were dotted with those names: Mary Pickford, the Gish sisters, Gloria Swanson and, a picture of marital bliss, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Joan Crawford on the beach. By the time Nickolas Muray had taken that shot of the couple in 1929, the Hollywood marketing machine had already started cranking up, “grooming people and positioning them, letting only certain images out,” according to Desmond.
In the new incarnation of Vanity Fair the cult of celebrity “comes increasingly to the fore”. Powerful names, more than ever, “show what they want us to see… there’s a magazine to be sold, desires catered to.” Thus Harry Benson’s photograph of a dancing Ronald and Nancy Reagan; the casually glamorous Princess Diana, taken by fashion photographer Mario Testino, in the last photo shoot before her death in 1997; Rupert Murdoch, “a romantic image by Leibovitz, in control of his own ship.” Writers and composers can still be found within the pages of the magazine – Martin Amis, Philip Glass, Seamus Heaney – but scientists and explorers are less apparent. In truth, as far as
Vanity Fair portraiture goes, Hollywood now rules.
In keeping with the times, sex sells – most controversially with the 1991 Leibovitz cover shot of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore. Celebs from Raquel Welch to Scarlett Johansson are shown in various states of undress. “In the earlier Vanity Fair, you’re much more conscious of the person as intellect rather than body,” says Desmond. “And maybe that’s the difference. Maybe celebrity’s about the body.”
But perhaps celebrity is about anything that the celebrities want it to be about. Looking at the exhibition, there is the sense that today’s stars are active collaborators in the process. In a nod to the setting and period of her award-winning performance in The Hours, there’s a shot of Nicole Kidman looking “languorously glamorous, like a painting”; a super-fit Hilary Swank looks as if she’s just run off the set of a Nike ad; and then there’s George Clooney, afloat and surrounded by a troop of [underwear-clad] beauties, “as the object of adulation – it’s complete hero worship,” says Dawson.
Source:
Qantas The Australian Way June 2009