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Annie Leibovitz walked so that ChatGPT could run.
That’s the thought I had upon seeing the celebrity photographer’s heroic photo of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman standing atop a foggy bluff, his back to the camera on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Leibovitz, who trained at San Francisco Art Institute, was the chief mythmaker of both the baby boomer era as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone and the era of celebrity superstardom as the photographer of choice for Tina Brown and Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair and Anna Wintour’s Vogue. Her work is rarely intended to humanize her subjects. Instead, it’s meant to make them appear superhuman, which is probably why she’s a favorite of would-be autocrats and their chief enablers.
That’s why it makes sense that VF’s newish global editorial director (a job that used to be humbly referred to as an editor-in-chief) would want Leibovitz to capture one of the most divisive figures of the moment. In one deft image, the photographer tells several stories: As the tech world discusses ‘frontier models’ for AI, Altman reaches the the literal frontier; the 41-year-old executive is imagined as a theoretical Great Man in the Thomas Carlyle mold; a magazine that was once a definer of the zeitgeist makes one last stab at relevance before it’s fully subsumed by the slop its cover subject has grown obscenely rich off of creating.
As art semiotics students in the 90s used to say, it’s a rich text.
It’s also, as is Leibovitz’s wont, a barely hidden homage. As others have noted, the Altman picture is a clumsy appropriation of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Fog (1817). Leibovitz has a long history of appropriating images for her celebrity photography, whether it’s August Sander’s Bricklayer (1928) for a VF cover of Michael Douglas in April 2010, Harry R. Hopps’ WWI recruitment poster for an April 2008 Vogue cover of Lebron James and Gisele Bündchen, or varied and sundry works of art for a December 2013 Vogue spread of Jessica Chastain.
One hardly needs to pay Leibovitz’s reported $250k day rate to produce glossy knock offs like this anymore. ChatGPT can easily cook up an homage to nearly anything, having “studied” the whole of human visual history to create its soulless, derivative output. Leibovitz’s coy references and high concept shoots (the Blues Brothers painted blue… Keith Haring painted like a Keith Haring… Steve Martin’s white suit painted black) can be easily prompted by amateurs. Like so many of us in the world of art, literature, journalism, or film and TV, Leibovitz’s work is easily and cheaply replaced by AI.
Like ChatGPT, Leibovitz can be clueless and a bit biased with her output, as that plainly racist 2008 Lebron James Vogue cover showed. For this Altman pic, Leibovitz’s visual homage may lead to another uncomfortable reading: Friedrich’s paintings, while created decades before the rise of the Third Reich, are often cited by historians as an inspiration to the Nazis who found in Friedrich’s pastoral scenes a romanticized fantasy of German lebensraum. Hitler, a failed painter, was apparently a fan of Friedrich’s work and emulated it in his own work.
Is that really something Sam Altman would want to be associated with — even obliquely? Is Vanity Fair making a sly critique of its cover boy, suggesting he is, to paraphrase Gil Durán, a spiritual antecedent of the Nerd Reich?
Hard to say, mostly because Leibovitz’s appropriations are so haphazard that they defy interpretation. Was she intentionally evoking Time’s Feb. 17,1936 cover of Leni Riefenstahl with her June 1997 Vanity Fair cover of Arnold Schwarzenegger? I don’t know, but the comparison between Condé Nast’s top celebrity snapper and the chief imagemaker for the Third Reich has been made before; Leibovitz has certainly shown an interest in WWII era iconography.
So, as noted, her Altman cover is, indeed, a rich text. As writer Darran Anderson concluded of the original Wanderer Above the Fog in History Today in 2019, “The painting can be interpreted as the so-called ‘triumph of the will’, but also the humbling of the ego amid the vastness of nature and existence.” Maybe Leibovitz’s Altman is meant to be both: a portrait of a towering Great Man and a soft-chinned nebbish.
Then again, maybe the man isn’t the focus, but the landscape in front of him. It’s easy to imagine this bluff is the “big patch of land in Big Sur,” that Altman listed along with “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force” he told The New Yorker in 2016 he’d amassed to survive an AI catastrophe or nuclear war. (Tellingly, he also fretted about the “nonzero” chances of “a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years” four years before Covid.)
But then, neither you, nor I, nor, probably, Annie Leibovitz and her team would be invited to see Altman’s Big Sur redoubt. The guy only has so much potassium iodide to go around.
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DISPATCHES FROM THE FOG
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