Viola Davis covers Vanity Fair's July/August issue and makes history by inviting a Black photographer, Dario Calmese, to shoot her cover, marking the first time in the magazine's history. Here's what editor in chief Radhika Jones had to say about the groundbreaking moment:
“Our mission at Vanity Fair is to capture the zeitgeist,” Jones writes in her editor’s letter. “We feel that responsibility especially keenly at this moment, when it seems as if our ways of seeing each other may be shifting, finally. What can one person’s face on a magazine cover accomplish, in this context? It can add to our pantheon of people whose work and ambition we aspire to. That is no small thing.This is [Calmese’s] first major magazine cover, and we celebrate him and honor his vision at this heightened moment in American history, writes Jones. No amount of praise or censure affects me, in my current role, so much as the hope that our choices might inspire a young person—a future actor, director, photographer, writer—to pursue their own creative vision or imagine themself in our pages.”
Calmese describes the concept of his Viola Davis cover as “a re-creation of the Louis Agassiz slave portraits taken in the 1800s—the back, the welts. The image reclaims that narrative, transmuting the white gaze on Black suffering into the Black gaze of grace, elegance, and beauty.”
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