Portraits of Power
In 1976, Richard Avedon went to Washington to photograph Henry Kissinger. As Avedon was leading him to his mark, Kissinger said, “Be kind to me.”Artists have been making portraits of the mighty for centuries—from Velázquez’s Philip IV to Lucian Freud’s El
via The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2009/12/07/091207_audioslideshow_platon
This past September, when nearly all the world’s leaders were in New York for a meeting of the United Nations, Platon, a staff photographer for this magazine, set up a tiny studio off the floor of the General Assembly, and tried to hustle as many of them in front of his lens as possible. For months, members of the magazine’s staff had been writing letters to various governments and embassies, but the project was a five-day-long improvisation, with Platon doing his best to lure the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez, and Muammar Qaddafi to his camera.