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Vanity Fair Portraits

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A fair of vanity descends upon the nation's capital, featuring celebrities captured by celebrity photographers.

Editorial


Vanity Fair magazine has always represented a far-off land of decadence and luxury, where the world's leading sound, screen and stage players come together to lounge in style. This world, created and captured by some of the greatest portrait photographers of the modern age, is to be displayed in Australia on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery.

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 - 2008 will exhibit photographs from Vanity Fair's two periods of publication - 1913 to 1936 and 1983 to now - and will feature work by Helmut Newton, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Annie Leibovitz and many more.

One piece that exemplifies the lavish opulence reigning supreme over the magazine's pages is a shot of actress Julianne Moore reclining in a recreation of Ingres's 1814 work La Grande Odalisque. When the original was first painted, Europe was absorbed in the aesthetic tradition of Orientalism, exoticising the East and Africa as places strewn with harems of beautiful white women kept as sexual captives. In the update, captured by Michael Thompson in 2000, Moore represents an exotic other; a celebrity who inhabits a world completely dissimilar to our own and completely out of reach as she stares at us from the lap of luxury.

Image: Julianne Moore as Ingres's 'Grand Odalisque' 2000 Copyright 2000 Michael Thompson Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Julianne Gill

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