After the smashing success of Vogue Italia's commemorative issue to Black women a few months back, the Italians are at it again in this month's issue with a stunning and somewhat controversial photo exposé on Barbadian pop princess Rihanna. Photographer Steven Klein, playing Eadweard Muybridge here, sets Rihanna up in front of an anthropometric grid, similar to those used by early race scientists to measure bodily features with photographs. It's certainly interesting considering that Muybridge's Animal Locomotion project, to which Klein's photos resemble the most, never featured any women of colour. Only one African-American man, strangely enough a boxer named Ben Bailey, was featured in Muybridge's study of human locomotion that included over one hundred White subjects. Why now I ask? Many critics are likening these photos to early investigative police photography, using Rihanna's recent dust-up with defamed ex-boyfriend Chris Brown as the catalyst. But these images say much more about early Western anthropological and photographic sciences than police photography. Klein is provoking a dialogue about the myths of human form. It's certainly not as flagrant as Annie Leibovitz's Vogue cover photograph of NBA star Lebron James with supermodel Giselle Bundchen in a recreation of the King Kong trope, but it's in the ballpark.
Defender Telegraph, page 3, No. 001
i wrote this really long comment but my computer froze! argh. you're getting the coles notes version.(sorry) great blog! stunning photos! i like that these photos/images are flipping the original project on its head so to speak. i want to get my hands on a copy of this issue.
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