Annie Leibovitz has photographed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for the cover of 2026 “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair, accompanying a two-part interview with the magazine.
The cover portrait depicts Altman from behind, hands on hips, surveying a foggy coastline from a cliff's edge. The photograph is accompanied by a line of text reading, “Sam Altman sees the future—are we in it?” The composition appears to be a restaging of German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich's iconic 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, now held in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The painting is considered a definitive example of the “Rückenfigur,” an artistic device showing a figure turned away in order to invite viewers to imagine themselves in the painting.
Friedrich's wanderer, shown in a green overcoat, gazing out over a misty mountain landscape, has often been interpreted as contemplation of the sublime, the fog a symbol of the unknown future. In Leibovitz's interpretation, Friedrich's vision of the Elbe Sandstone cliffs in Bohemia is replaced by Bay Area bluffs, and Altman stands in as the solitary man positioned at the edge of a cliff. While Friedrich’s figure contemplated nature’s connection to divinity, Altman, it might be inferred, contemplates the future of artificial intelligence. The reference offers an uneasy inversion, with Friedrich’s figure enthralled by nature, and Altman, the artificial and technological. Altman’s cover story leads Vanity Fair’s revived “New Establishment” list, with the tech CEO addressing AI safety lapses, government regulation, and his rivalry with Elon Musk in an interview.
This is far from the first time Leibovitz has looked to art history for inspiration, linking her subjects to famed precedents for beauty, power, or interiority. In 2002, she photographed actress Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo for Vogue, drawing on Kahlo's own self-portraiture. For a 2013 Vogue shoot, she restaged eight famous paintings using actress Jessica Chastain as her model. The cover pictured Chastain as Frederic Leighton's Flaming June, with reimaginings of works by Vincent van Gogh, René Magritte, Félix Vallotton, and Julia Margaret Cameron accompanying the feature story. More recently, Leibovitz's August 2025 Vogue cover story styled Anne Hathaway as John Singer Sargent's Madame X.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/pRWVsSj
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