Facing Up to the Face of Pure Evil

"Washington Diarist" Leon Wieseltier muses about portrait photography and how it can tend to smooth over any rough edges (and mask evil intentions):

I am as worldly as the next dreamer, but the scales fell from my eyes, the same ones that keep finding their way back to my eyes, when I opened The New Yorker a few weeks ago and found, in a portfolio of “portraits of power,” Mussolini’s full-page face piggishly staring at me in chicly lurid detail, the very emblem of brutality made aesthetically acceptable. And when I turned the page there was Franco, in full generalissimo kit gazing coldly forward, every hair on his heartless mustache uncannily vivid in a miracle of photographic verisimilitude. Is nobody any longer beyond the pale? Is moral judgment now bad form? Is repugnance a thing of the past? I’m lying, of course. Neither Mussolini nor Franco appeared in The New Yorker’s exciting feature. But Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, Chávez, and Qaddafi did. They were shot--sorry, I’m dreaming again--they were photographed by Platon at the United Nations in September, where, according to an unsigned editor’s note, he set up a little studio not far from the General Assembly. “For months, members of the magazine’s staff had been writing letters to various governments and embassies”--imagine some of those letters!--“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.” I guess Omar Al Bashir was out of town. The photographer made things worse with an unbelievable audio account of the adventure. “To get Chávez was a big, big deal,” he exulted. And “Ahmadinejad is, believe it or not, a very childlike man. He’s short, shorter than me, I think. He giggles like a little boy. I didn’t want to paint a caricature of him: tough and mean. I wanted to show this irony that there’s an innocence about his eyes. So that’s what this picture is about.” Actually, that’s not what this picture is about. It is a perfectly familiar photo that conveys, in unfascinating close-up, only the sitter’s trademark smirk. The picture is about the art of the get, and nothing more. The editor’s note compares Platon’s project to Avedon--and alludes to Velázquez, like any undergraduate discussion of portraits of power--but these pictures display none of Avedon’s revelations, or interpretations, in portraiture. Avedon’s distortions were at least the evidence of a temperament; but there is no temperament in Platon’s people, there is just a pushy frontality and a phony intimacy, as if you capture a person when you capture his pores. These pictures are exercises in a stylized neutrality, a willful indifference to everything we know about their subjects. There is not “an innocence” about Ahmadinejad’s eyes, or ears, or nose. He is, in his every detail, guilty. He represses his society and subjugates its women and shoots its young people and steals its elections and threatens to incinerate another country. Fuck his giggle...

Sorry about the cuss word, but I think it's quite a propos here.