Radhika Jones on Icons, Fame, and Evolution – Vanity Fair

It was something I had noticed about Vanity Fair myself, from the outside, that lack of representation. I was determined to change it when I took over as editor in chiefnot just as a corrective measure but because it is my job, and the magazines job, to center people who are visionaries, who are moving the culture forward. We are not bound to continue the cultural hierarchies we inherit. In my two-and-a-half-year tenure, with the same exceptions for groups and special issues, weve featured 10 Black cover subjectsfrom my first, Lena Waithe, in April 2018, to last months Janelle Mone to this months Viola Davis. And we know that Vanity Fairs evolution has resonated, because in the past two and a half years our audience on every platform has grown, including those of you who subscribe.

This month brings its own milestone. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first Vanity Fair cover made by a Black photographer. Dario Calmeses first V.F. assignment was a feature on Billy Porter a little more than a year ago. Since then, he has photographed the actors George MacKay and Adrienne Warren for us. This is his first major magazine cover, and we celebrate him and honor his vision at this heightened moment in American history. Calmese describes his cover concept as a re-creation of the Louis Agassiz slave portraits taken in the 1800sthe back, the welts. This image reclaims that narrative, transmuting the white gaze on Black suffering into the Black gaze of grace, elegance, and beauty.

No amount of praise or censure affects me, in my current role, so much as the hope that our choices might inspire a young persona future actor, director, photographer, writerto pursue their own creative vision or imagine themself in our pages. Iconography carries influence. I think about the magazine cover that hangs in my living room, the 1964 Time portrait of Thelonious Monk, painted by Boris Chaliapin. Three years after that cover ran, my father served as Monks road manager on a European tour. Footage of the tour was later made into a film, directed by Charlotte Zwerin and produced by Clint Eastwood. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser opens with Monk playing Evidence and dancing onstage, then cuts to a conversation between Monk and my father. They are in a room backstage, or perhaps in a hotelthere is a small shelf of books behind Monkand my father has pulled out an encyclopedia and paged to the Ms and found, among the popes and presidents, what he was looking for. Thelonious, he reads. Thelonious Sphere. Born 1918? Question mark. Dad laughs. U.S. jazz pianist and composer. It appears youre famous, Thelonious. Monk replies: Im famous. Aint that a bitch. Fame meant far less than his art. But he knew it made a difference.