Chris Anderson, photo of Vice President JD Vance for a Vanity Fair photoshoot (2025) (all photos courtesy Condé Nast unless otherwise noted)
Yesterday, December 16, Vanity Fair published a two-part article on President Trump’s inner circle. It included photographs by Chris Anderson, best-known for his close-up photos of celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Margot Robbie for outlets such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Anderson photopgraphed Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and White House advisor James Blair. The portraits included close-ups that heightened every pore and fine line (and lip injection site), and shots that rendered these political figures comically tiny, swallowed up by their backdrops.
Anderson’s photo of the vice president, for instance, essentially transforms his actual visage into one of the bloated JD Vance memes; his face balloons across the entire composition. These photos — contrary to Anderson’s own protestations — are not comparable to his other celebrity photo shots, such as that of Rosalía. Rather than the hazy, dreamy glow and airbrush-smooth skin of the Spanish singer, blood vessels burst across the bridge of his nose; an unidentified white fleck dots his lip. The photograph certainly trades in disgust — but I wouldn’t call it, or any of these photos, “monstrous,” as so many others on the internet have, whether to gloat or to protest. That would give these political operatives too much credit. Rather, Anderson positions the members of the Trump administration not as inhuman, but as all-too-human: anxious, incompetent actors on a stage set, ill at ease in these compositions, over their heads in their positions, and visibly degraded for the vicious agenda they perpetuate.
Chris Anderson, photo of Vice President JD Vance for a Vanity Fair photoshoot (2025)
Anderson’s photos are either cropped far too closely, as in that unfortunate image of Vance, or far too distantly. Take, for instance, another depiction of the vice president. His hands are arranged importantly on his suit jacket; he’s got the furrowed brow of someone who’s trying to look like he’s thinking about something important, but he mostly looks scrunched-up and constipated. His placement next to a light switch is diabolical, as many have pointed out — and intentional. Vance likely thought it was something that would be digitally removed in edits; he’s right, it usually would. Its inclusion suggests to the viewer that this is not an edited photo, in intentional contrast to the hyper-airbrushed, post-truth images the Trump administration intentionally disseminates — that this is how Vance actually is: awkward, small, trying to make himself more than he is. They present themselves as the unvarnished truth that the administration is withholding from the public.
Anderson himself has tried to suggest as much. “My objective, when photographing the political world, is to make photographs that cut through the staged-managed image to reveal something more real and for the images to honestly portray the encounter that I had at that moment,” he told Newsweek. That’s nonsense — an idea of photographic truth we’ve dispelled with since the time of Walter Benjamin. These tell their own truths, as all photographs do — which isn’t to say that those truths don’t coincide with the actual truth. The expanse of blank wall above Vance’s head and the cropping beneath his feet — which reveals just how close against the wall he’s hiding, as if shrinking back in fear from something — frames him as small, scared, and more than a touch pathetic.
Chris Anderson, photo of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles for a Vanity Fair photoshoot (2025)
Or take Anderson’s depiction of Wiles, who looks like a kid trying on her mom’s suit. Yet again, there’s a large swath of wall over her that shrinks her in the frame; cut-off picture frames above and to the right of her only emphasize how much the room looms over her. An open doorway to the left of her opens out into a hallway and another door behind that, creating a depth to the picture plane that only seems to emphasize Wiles’s smallness. It’s almost a playful picture, like if Annie Leibovitz lit a Wes Anderson composition. You almost feel bad for her.
Marco Rubio doing … I don’t even know what (photo @Vanity Fair via Instagram, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Or this photo of Marco Rubio, looking like a kid who’s been put in time-out. Yet again, he’s rendered small, set in the background of a zoomed-out frame. The horizon line is askew, which makes the depiction feel more candid, again suggesting to the viewer that this is an honest depiction, rather than a staged shot.
Chris Anderson, photo of key members of the Trump administration for a Vanity Fair photoshoot (2025)
Consider Anderson’s photograph of the entire crew sitting in a White House conference room. Nearly the full bottom half of the composition is dominated by the polished wood of a large wooden table; all seven of them are squashed together in essentially one quarter of the composition. That large wooden table is streaked by their smeared reflections, making them look all the more diminished and insubstantial.
Indeed, mirroring is one of Anderson’s core compositional strategies, revealing these politicians as sad, poor copies of effective leadership. Leavitt’s face is oriented in the same three-quarters view as the portrait of Abraham Lincoln behind her, an unflattering echo of presidential gravitas that only emphasizes the difference between them. The three men standing beneath Tadé Styka’s c. 1909 painting of Theodore Roosevelt on a horse (particularly Rubio, who’s giving “🧍🏻♂️”), in which the president sits calmly astride a rearing horse, drives home the difference between these historical depictions of American leaders and their cheap contemporary copies.
(photo @Vanity Fair via Instagram, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
These depictions of members of the presidential administration seem intended to be read in parallel to another photo in Anderson’s portfolio. This one depicts a tiny figurine of Trump himself — looking markedly thinner and healthier than his actual self — raising a miniscule fist, dwarfed by the printer beside him as if to emphasize that his power is merely pretense.
A depiction of Leavitt emphasizes the tchotchke aesthetic of Trumpism — more of that spray-painted Home Depot gilding. She stands before a reproduction of Berthe Morisot’s “Peonies” (c. 1869), as pointed out by user “sands_stars” on TikTok, despite the fact that the actual work is held in the National Gallery’s collection.
(photo @Vanity Fair via Instagram, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)(photo @Vanity Fair via Instagram, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
But no discourse about Anderson’s photos can avoid this horrifying shot of Leavitt. Much of the online response has been cruel, clowning her for the visible dotting of lip injections along her top lip, for the wrinkled skin in which thick foundation has settled. A lot of it is deeply sexist — as if we don’t all live in a world in which women are subject to impossible beauty demands. But Anderson’s decision to zoom in on this particular detail of her visage should be read not as an indictment of Leavitt’s physical features, but rather a visual representation of her active decision to perpetuate Trump’s vicious agenda — less importantly in its aesthetic and more crucially as its mouthpiece. Indeed, Trump himself has creepily praised those lips (“that beautiful face and those lips that don’t stop.”) She, like all of the politicians Anderson depicts, has remade herself in Trump’s image, and Anderson’s camera captures exactly what that costs.
