Artistic Expression in a Post Truth World: The Trump Administration and the Vanity Fair Photos

Image - White House

The internet was recently left bemused upon Vanity Fair’s bombshell profile piece on the Trump Administration, particularly its photography. Hyperrealistic close ups diagnosing every disconcerted stare, high contrast intensifying of blotchy skin texture and pursed lips in an untarnished look at some of the most powerful people in the United States. Upon release, photojournalist Christopher Anderson incited both backlash and praise for its provocative nature. The visual language on display and its subsequent reception are emblematic of the role of artistic expression in shaping media criticism in a time of cultural instability and increasing threats to democracy. Anderson told the Independent, ‘I like the idea of penetrating the theatre of politics’, referring to his work as ‘X-ray icons’ where he focuses on the intimacy of his subject’s faces beyond form posture.

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The face as the focal point emphasises the individual and strips them from being subject to their surroundings. When an environment of discourse and civic agency erodes to the will of the individual political actor amongst increasing polarisation, what then is worth capturing rather than that actor themselves? Take, for example, the close up of Susie Wiles’ wide eyed stare. During the Vanity Fair interview, Wiles refers to Trump as ‘having an alcoholic’s personality’, drawing on her experience growing up with an alcoholic father, she remarks further that she is therefore an ‘expert in big personalities’. Her intense gaze reflects this job, the chaos of facilitating the zero sum whims of the President.

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Wiles considers her contemporaries as ‘disrupters’, positioning herself as the pivot that keeps the chaos turning. The other photo of her, a full body portrait, suggests otherwise. Taken at a distance, she is composed at the centre of the frame, however she is not the focal point of the image. She blends into the backdrop rather than standing in the foreground, while a doorway takes up a significant section of the frame’s depth. Anderson perhaps contends that Wiles is not the centre piece of the Trump administration, rather a caretaker to the doorways of power that Trump walks through. Her role as chief of staff requires her to both facilitate and reign in the President, however this portrait of Wiles suggests that no band of disrupters can truly reign in the chief disrupter himself.

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There are two notable photos of Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. The first poises Rubio from behind, captured from a distance, looking out the White House Windows with his hands entrenched in his pockets. Windows as an artistic trope are often employed as a means of adding light and texture to an image or, conversely, to highlight the lack of light coming into a room. Rubio’s photograph is evocative of the latter. Anderson captures the private realm Rubio inhabits as dominating the image and dampening the incoming light from the public sphere. Placed within the context of the Trump administration’s extensive dismantling of USAID, the photograph is evocative of the ‘America First’ rhetoric of the administration urging the shift away from previously established US bureaucratic commitments toward self interest.

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The second photo of Rubio is particularly absurd. He is pictured side facing, bowing to a table lamp. A lamp, one must note, is an artificial light, subverting light as a tool for enlightenment. The visual language of using a lamp in this context serves to criticise Trumpism as an artificially curated form of populism that appeals to MAGA followers as a beacon of light for the everyman’s fight against the ‘deep state’. Under Trump, however, corporate tax has been cut from 35% to 21% and the wealthy see disproportionate tax cuts comparatively to the lower middle classes.

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Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, is positioned in the foreground of his portrait. Yet a painting of Native Americans Crossing the River Platte by Worthington Whittredge sits in the backdrop. Anderson curates a visually striking irony, drawing a parallel between the dispossession and marginalisation of natives and the administration’s deployment of masked ice agents to round up immigrants, snatched from their work and homes, for deportation. All without due process, with disregard of any record of criminality they are taken to detention centres. 238 Venezuelans were deported to the maximum security El Salvador prison, under the Trump administration’s claims of involvement with Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Denied communication with their relatives and chance of appeal, deportees face extensive human rights violations in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center’s notoriously brutal conditions of torture and beatings without any hope of appeal or constitutional protections. Meanwhile, the administration has also revoked Temporary Protected Status, affecting 1.3 million people. While his revoking of birth right citizenship threatens to expand this agenda further, a systematic process unregulated due to its increase in funding. Anderson’s photo suggests that in the face of the administration’s dehumanisation of immigrants and authoritarian practices, their identity, presence and humanity persists in the foundations of American identity regardless of those who try to suppress it.

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Perhaps the most notable photo of the bunch is of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Vanity Fair titling her ‘The Mouthpiece’ as Leavitt is the face of the administration’s combativeness towards the media. The focal point of this image pertains to her lips, honing in on bruises and spots typical of injections from lip filler. Critics argue that this image of Leavitt perpetuates an unjust gender specific standard put toward women in the public eye due to the vitriol it invites. Anderson’s style, however, serves not to retouch his subjects. Both narratively and photographically, the visual focus upon Leavitt as ‘The Mouthpiece’ reflects her role as the public figure of the administration. Not as one with agency, but as the mouthpiece subjected to repeating the talking points of the administration and her loyalty to the administration’s ever changing narratives. In his lack of touching up the image, Anderson draws out the dichotomy between candid reality and the image projected in the administration, Leavitt the figurative and material mouthpiece that conducts the regime’s will.

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In an era of post-truth claims of fake news and significant cuts to the arts, Christopher Anderson’s photojournalism serves as a poignant reminder of free artistic expression’s role in providing criticism of an administration that threatens the very democratic foundations of accountability.