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How would you like to see Donald Trump represented? Assume for the moment that a satirical caricature would be too obvious. Likewise the standard studio portrait. Consider instead a staged photograph (since any candid shot would be nearly impossible, considering the level of personal protection he commands). Here is how Annie Leibovitz solved the esthetic challenge: Trump is sitting behind the wheel of an elaborate sports car, so extreme it looks like a prototype rather than anything actually off a production line. The car is parked, facing left, on an airport tarmac; Trump's face is largely hidden from view, as if all his attention were elsewhere. All is speed and action, no? But there is also the rear end of a (presumably private) jet plane centered in the picture. Walking up the stairs to board the plane is Melinda Trump, Donald's suitably striking spouse, quite pregnant and dressed in a gold lamé bikini. Speed and action redoubled. Was this configuration Leibovitz' idea, and if so, did she have difficulty convincing her subjects to enact the tableau? Or were they able to see through the utter vulgarity of the imagery and embrace what, after all, is a nearly perfect representation of their lifestyle? Leibovitz has described her working method as one that does not involve her engaging her subjects in conversation (as other portrait photographers usually do); instead she likes just to use a prop or setting to convey character. The surface and the setting, we might assume, are all the story or insight we need. With the Trumps, the method may be replete.
Not everyone Leibovitz photographs is part of the milieu that the Trumps inhabit, but many of them partake of at least some of the same aura. The Brooklyn Museum show of her work, grandly entitled "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005," was accompanied by a massive book version of the photographs. The museum showed two hundred shots; the book contains half again as many. Many genres lend their conventions to the display: photojournalism, studio portraits, landscapes, and family album snapshots. But the portraits were the source of her reputation, and these were often most strikingly of celebrities, and of a certain Warholian sort, along the fault lines between entertainment, culture and politics. We shouldn't...