Photographer Defends White House Close-Ups

Photographer Christopher Anderson is taking a lot of flak over close-up photos in a Vanity Fair article that ruffled the Trump administration, but he rejects accusations that he was being unfair. He tells the Washington Post that extreme close-ups have long been his style. "I have done it to all sides of the political spectrum, not just Republicans. It's part of how I think about portraiture in a lot of ways: close, intimate, revealing."

• Anderson's 2014 book Stump featured close-ups of figures on both sides of the 2008 presidential campaign. "Very close-up portraiture has been a fixture in a lot of my work over the years," he tells the Independent. "Particularly, political portraits that I've done over the years. I like the idea of penetrating the theater of politics."

• One of the extreme close-ups showed what appeared to be filler injection marks around White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt's lips, People reports. Anderson tells the Post: "I didn't put the injection sites on her. People seem to be shocked that I didn't use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things."
• On accusations that the photos were an attack or pettiness, he says: "If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it, and make them look better than they look? And I would also repeat: This has been a fixture of my work for many years." He says his goal is not to make anybody look good or bad. "I go in wanting to make an image that truthfully portrays what I witnessed at the moment that I had that encounter with the subject."
• Anderson also took close-ups of administration members including Susie Wiles, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller for the Vanity Fair piece, which was split into Part 1 and Part 2.

• "I'll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session," Anderson tells the Post. "He asked me, 'Should I smile or not smile?' and I said, 'How would you want to be portrayed?' We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, 'You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.' And I looked at him and I said, 'You know, you do, too."
• Asked by People for a comment on the Post interview, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said it was "clear that Vanity Fair intentionally photographed Karoline and the White House staff in bizarre ways, and deliberately edited the photos, to try to demean and embarrass them."