That Vanity Fair piece is a million times more brutal once you start noticing these subtle details.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Okay, y'all. We have got to talk about the Vanity Fair piece that came out today about members of the current administration because oh my god, very unflattering. Um, but I specifically want to talk about the photographs included. As someone that used to work professionally as a photojournalist and also used to run an art gallery, I noticed some pretty interesting things about a couple of these photos that I haven't seen anyone else point out. So, I think they're worth talking about. So, I want to start with actually one of my favorite photos in the whole piece, which is this group shot of all of them together. Um, first of all, the fact that they are depicted as being in two separate factions. Specifically, I think that they are grouped by the people who are um, who are most gung-ho about aggressive immigration action and the ones that are not as gung-ho for it. But notably, J.D. Vance is in both sides and there are two faces to him in this photograph. I don't think that that is an accident. I think this photo directly shows J.D. Vance as two-faced. Another really interesting photo uh, detail that I noticed is in this photo of Stephen Miller where he's sitting on the couch and he's got this huge very ornate framed piece of artwork hanging over his head. So, the painting that he is sitting under is a painting called Indian encampment on the Platte River by Thomas Worthington Whittredge.

[00:01:22]Whittredge was an impressionist artist and he was notable because his subject matter was very very different for the time. So, you have to understand that in the time when this painting was made, Native American communities were still very much being depicted as you know, dangerous savages that represented a threat to white people. Um, and so most artists would either depict them like that or they just wouldn't depict them at all and would instead be focusing on the scenery. It would be like a painting of the mountains and trees, etc. etc. Whittredge on the other hand, did focus very heavily on Native American communities in his art. And universally across the board, he always depicted those communities as peacefully interacting with their natural surroundings, as representing no threat at all, and always set back from the viewer, which he would have presumed to be a white person. So, the fact that they put Stephen Miller underneath a painting by an artist pushing back against white people who demonize brown-skinned people, I'm not saying that it's on purpose, but I am saying I don't think that it was accidental.

[00:02:24]Another really interesting one that I think the placement of the artwork in the background is important is this picture of Berthe Morisot. She is standing in front of a painting by a female artist named Berthe Morisot, one of the founding artists of the Impressionist movement, but unlike her male counterparts who also co-founded the Impressionist movement, she has been largely forgotten by most of the public, largely due to her gender. She tended to specifically paint very intimate domestic scenes compared to her male counterparts. And I thought it was interesting that this painting, it's a painting of peonies. Peonies have an incredibly short bloom time. They have an incredibly short shelf life before they go bad, which could be a metaphor, I'm just saying.

[00:03:06]Obviously, all of the individual portraits are important. This photo of Carolyn Levitt is one of the most unfortunate things I think I've ever seen in my entire life. The fact that you can see all of the injection marks along the top lip, oh, definitely not an accident, definitely uncomfortable. But the fact that most of the portraits are cropped in so close, I think it's meant to create visual tension and like a feeling of uncomfortableness for the viewer. I also wanted to point out the commonality that both individual photos of Marco Rubio, the thing that both of those photos have in common is that Marco Rubio is not looking at the viewer. He's looking off frame either down into the left or he's got his back to the viewer entirely. And I think that both photographs are meant to show him in this like very longing, morose sort of state where um he might be regretting tying himself to this administration or he's just wishing he was elsewhere. I think that is the feeling that those photographs are meant to evoke. Finally, just because I think it's hilarious, I loved the petty inclusion of J.D. Vance's Bible which displays one of his uh many previous names since he's continued to change his name over and over again to find the one that, you know, polls the best with the public. So, uh all around 10 out of 10 work. I love this. I love this photographer. And I'd love to hear what you guys think.