Vanity Fair approximately

I went to the new Vanity Fair photographic retrospective currently being held at the national portrait gallery this past easter weekend, and it really was impressive. If not for anything else it is a chance to see some fantastic pictures by Annie Liebovitz, whose control of lighting, in my opinion, is just fantastic. Looking at any one of her pictures, even of a subject relatively far from the lens, the detail on the face is immense. I very much recommend the exhibition on such photographs alone.

It was, however, something somewhat more idiosyncratic that stood as the highlight for me. I have now learned that Vanity Fair had a certain penchant for Modernist writers. I am something of a fan of the Modernists, and particularly the ones Vanity Fair had featured in the magazines early years. At this exhibition alone were photos of Huxley, Stein (the great self-lauder), Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and even the big dog himself James Joyce. Maybe it’s just me being impressionable, but it was something of a thrill, nay, inspirational, to see such beautiful pictures of the very writers that I am trying to, in some, albeit tenuous, way, emulate in my present work.

Needless to say it was these personalities that occupied the vast majority of the ’20’s section. Occupying our, more recent, decades, were the likes of Keira Knightley and Jennifer Aniston. This isn’t my, rather obvious, attempt at highlighting the deplorable state of who we socially admire in the current age, trust me, I think it much more the magazine’s problem than society’s. But I did feel it a shame somewhat that the only contemporary writer’s portrait, that I can remember, from the exhibition was that of Martin Amis’. And it wasn’t even a very good one.