Reply #63: My take is that the article's author is about 4 days behind the curve

[krkaufman]

I've been posting since last Thursday AM (3/27), based on a tip from my nephew Weds night, that the Vogue cover photo is based on a WWI military recruitment propaganda poster, and started posting a side-by-side image to illustrate the point. (see here for a detailed list of the similarities)

By Friday afternoon the image had made its way to Huffington Post... via a couple other bloggers*...

HuffPost -- Uncovered: Possible Inspiration For Controversial LeBron James Vogue Cover

Now, Sportsfilter blogger Rogers Cadenhead (via Portfolio.com's Jeff Bercovici) uncovered a possible (likely) inspiration for the Annie Liebovitz shoot: a famous World War I recruitment poster from 1917.

The poster, which shows a gorilla and says "Destroy This Brute," would seem to justify any sort of outrage over the racial stereotypes perpetuated by the Vogue cover.

I don't have a clue who staged the photo to recreate the WWI poster, nor do I know what their intent may have been; but I can understand -- given historical precedents -- how many people will be outraged if/when this relationship hits the wider media, beyond the Intertubes.

But before I let Annie Liebovitz completely off the hook, I need to note that, in my surfing about on this subject, it's become apparent that Liebovitz has a penchant for such recreations; e.g. (h/t Jezebel) What I'm beginning to wonder, now, is whether Liebovitz may not have been trying to draw attention to a book by Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (h/t forgotten) -- a book whose "newly revised, paperback edition", coincidentally, hit the stores at about the same time as the controversial Vogue issue. Things that make you go hmmmm...

Oh, the cover of the book may seem familiar:

Lastly, I must note that both Phawker (3/17) and Jezebel (3/25) had ref'd the WWI propaganda poster before I was ever aware of the Vogue controversy and before my nephew made me aware of the poster; however, both sites failed to push the connection between the poster and the cover photo, opting, instead, to simply embed a pic of the poster in each of their articles.

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* Unfortunately, because Cadenhead opted not to credit the source of his information in his initial posts on the subject, the Huffington Post blogger, Danny Shea, missed the mention of DU in Cadenhead's later, expanded post to the 'Watching the Watchers' website:

The comparison was brought to light by K.R. Kaufman on the online community Democratic Underground.

... who credits his nephew.