Brooke Leigh Howard Updated Aug. 20, 2022 3:54AM ET / Published Aug. 19, 2022 1:07PM ET
It was supposed to be a momentous image: The first Black woman on the nation’s highest court, captured in a historic shoot for one of the world’s most distinguished publications. But the end product of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Vogue spread lit social media on fire this week, with many critics complaining that Vogue is too-high profile to continuously miss the mark when it comes to photographing Black subjects.
But the images got an overwhelmingly lukewarm reception online, where observers pointed to Leibovitz’s equally underwhelming photos of Black gymnast Simon Biles (for Vogue) and Black actress Viola Davis (for Vanity Fair) to question whether she simply has no idea how to illuminate darker-skinned subjects. (More)
Another perspective…
Annie Leibovitz is doing…Annie Leibovitz
You can say a lot about Annie Leibovitz’s style—including that you don’t get and never will get the hype. But with over 50 years in the game, it’s not that she doesn’t know how to light dark skin. It’s that she, like most photographers, uses light as a vehicle for storytelling in her portraiture, with mixed results. As evidenced by countless portraits, including last month’s Vogue cover of Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska as well as a quick scroll of Leibovitz’s Instagram page, her lighting choices aren’t always classically flattering to her subjects. And while it may legitimately be argued that those choices are especially unflattering on darker skin tones, it’s worth noting that Leibovitz was also the photographer behind Rihanna’s internet-breaking May 2022 maternity shoot, Amanda Gorman’s lovely March 2021 Vogue cover story, Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 Vanity Fair cover, and the photographer of all three of Michelle Obama’s Vogue cover stories to date. (Do we really think the first lady had no say in her photographer?) Just sayin’—if Annie Leibovitz were to be “canceled” for something, it should’ve been the perverse invoking of King Kong for the April 2008 Vogue cover featuring LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen. (More)