Monday, February 8, 2010

Vanity Fair's 2010 Hollywood Issue

I always find it amazing when things in the universe just align together and work in my favor. In this particular instance, we are working on a unit on Race and Ethnicity in the media and Vanity Fair puts out their 2010 Hollywood Issue roughly around the same time. I don't normally read Vanity Fair (too many advertizements and things out of my price range) but I usually enjoy the "Hollywood" issue, put out in February/March right before the Oscars, because it has interesting and provakative pictures, which are normally vintage inspired and "Old" Hollywood esque. Actually one of my favorite pictures of all time is this picture of Kate Winslet:


But of course there is always controversy surrounding Vanity Fair covers, and it looks like this year won't be any different. While reading the Huffington Post this morning, they had an article accusing Vanity Fair of "whitewashing" their Hollywood 2010 cover, because there is no diversity in terms of race on the cover. I uploaded it so that you can see for yourself:




Now I can see why everyone is in an uproar, because certainly the cover is lacking diversity, and this seems to be Vanity Fair's "2nd" strike in terms of unfair representation, as not too long ago they were accused of photoshopping Beyonce's skin to make it "whiter." But is it fair to call Vanity Fair racist? I'm not so sure. So I did a little research on previous Hollywood issue covers:








These covers are from 2008 and 2005, respectively. So now I'll open it up to you, class, as I'm curious to hear your opinion on the whole matter.