"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." - Dorothea Lange

Thursday, September 06, 2007

arbus again... and anderson cooper


This portrait, shot for Harper’s Bazaar, is described in Patricia Bosworth’s Arbus biography:

“To dispel the growing myth that [Arbus] only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph…As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper’s Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture, the infant resembles a flat white death’s head — eyes sealed shut, mouth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.”

"I have it in my bedroom," Cooper has said. "I think it's great."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

actually, I think it looks just like Anderson Cooper.

cg