The photographer who took extreme close-ups of top White House officials for Vanity Fair has defended his work after Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed the images as “deliberately manipulated.”
Christopher Anderson insists the ultra-zoomed-in photos, including one exposing what appears to be injection sites on White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s upper lip, are just his style—not a deliberate way to make President Donald Trump’s advisers look bad.
“Very close-up portraiture has been a fixture in a lot of my work over the years,” he told The Independent. “Particularly, political portraits that I’ve done over the years. I like the idea of penetrating the theater of politics.”
Anderson, 55, said his portraiture is consistent across the political aisle.
In a book he released in 2014, Stump, Anderson published similar up-close-and-personal photos with figures of the 2012 presidential election, including Democratic former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
“I know there’s a lot to be made with, ‘Oh, he intentionally is trying to make people look bad’ and that kind of thing—that’s not the case,” he told the Independent. “If you look at my photograph work, I’ve done a lot of close-ups in the same style with people of all political stripes.”
The close-up portrait of Leavitt, 28, received the most attention on Vanity Fair’s Instagram page, with much focus being on her lips. Over 12,000 people commented on the image, with the most popular brutally dunking on Leavitt’s appearance.
Leavitt has harshly criticized the magazine’s article about the administration—in which a chatty Wiles hurled insults at her colleagues and is now openly begging to keep her job—but has not addressed her portrait specifically.
Rubio, 54, could not help but criticize the photos, which were taken inside the White House on Nov. 13. That is the same day that a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails were released, including hundreds that mentioned Trump by name.
“It is obvious to most people that Vanity Fair deliberately manipulated pictures,” Rubio wrote on X.
Also unhappy with the fallout of his portrait was White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, who has been accused of rocking a “Hitler Youth” haircut. He called the Anti-Trump GOP group The Lincoln Project “sick and twisted” for posting that his hair resembled that of a Nazi.
“They know exactly what referring to me as Hitler does with 2.8 million followers,” Scavino wrote on X. “These are some sick and twisted bastards…”
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