This cover was at the center of a huge amount of controversy in 2008 after bloggers began to notice historically racists parallels in the imagery. To many, the image shows a gorilla like angry black man who seeks to possess a white woman. When bloggers started to point out the possibility of this World War I recruitment poster as being the model for the cover, people noticed that the similarities between the two were indeed hard to ignore.
One blogger from Watching The Watchers put it, "The positions of James and Bundchen, the way he holds his mouth, the color of his clothes, the color of her dress, the curls of her hair, the placement of her feet inside his and his arm around her waist, the basketball in the club hand, and his hunched-over posture." He believes, that Annie Leibovitz (who has a history of referencing iconic images in her own photographs) was blatantly referencing this poster in her photograph.
This type of photograph is not at all uncommon. It is typical for white athletes to be portrayed smiling or laughing, while black sports figures are portrayed as angry and violent. To me, this image is overtly racist and resorts to horrible stereotypes about black men as violent animals. But many do not see it this way. For as many bloggers who posted about the apparent racism in this cover, they recieved dozens of comments about how they were looking too much into things and reading what they wanted out of the image. One woman said, "James is a huge, black beautiful masculine statue and Gisele is a feminine, sexy gorgeous doll. I didn't see any kind of racist overtone to it. I still don't. I think there is such a hypersensitivity to race still in this country." Another commentor said, "It's a magazine for god's sake. Quit trying to be the pc police. I don't give a damn if she's with King Kong or Godzilla, it's a damn magazine that wants to sell some issues."
This cover is blatantly racist and harmful in the same way that Time's infamous OJ Simpson cover is. In both cases viewers have to wonder, "how could editors have missed this," and "was this intentional?" I think that regardless of intent--although it could be easily argued that Annie Leibovitz knew exactly what she was doing--this image is communicating and perpetuating racists notions about violence and black men.
I would like to disagree with your assertion that Annie Leibovitz purposely photographed LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen with intention of putting forward racist and violent imagery.
ReplyDeleteThe similarities between the cover shot and the WWI poster are very remarkable, and most times, fashion publications often use historical themes in their editorials and advertisements, however, the theme and notions behind this cover shot and the entire editorial are perpetuating the stereotype that black men are violent animals that kidnap white innocent women.
The editorial portrayed models that have a shape that is uncommon to the standard shape of models, and they are paired with fantastically in shape male athletes that have dominated their respective sport.
The choice of this cover shot was something that the both Leibovitz and the editors decided that would best portray the power that both Bundchen and James possess in themselves and their careers, not the power and violence in James and the innocence and youth of Bundchen.