Naked truth: Portfolio's vision is skin-deep
By CAROLE E. BARROWMAN Special to the Journal Sentinel
First Published, March 9, 2006
Let me begin by admitting that I appreciate the beauty of a well-rounded breast or the shape of a nice bottom as much as the next woman or man. Secondly, I'm not a prude. I've been teaching college for over 20, have two teenagers of my own, and I regularly read The Onion. Not much in our culture shocks or appalls me. That said, the Hollywood Portfolio in Vanity Fair really riled my aesthetic sensibilities.
Let's look at the cover image first. 
Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, describes the cover photograph of Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley spread across black satin as "lively." Puhleeze. I've seen more life in autopsy photos. Both women are displayed in teasingly peek-a-boob poses. Their pale bodies radiate anemia, and their expressions suggest not so much dreaminess as get me a warm fluffy robe and a hamburger soon.
Inside the portfolio pages, the images are no better from this feminist's perspective. Angelina Jolie, a woman who could make Billy Bob Thornton after a drunken binge look sexy, is posed in a bathtub full of what can only be described as anti-freeze or formaldehyde. The image makes you want to drag her out of the tub and begin CPR. In Carter's "Editor's Letter," he tells VF readers that Tom Ford, the ex-model turned businessman who revitalized haute couture in the '90s and whose creative vision this Hollywood Portfolio represents, insisted Jolie's "butt crack" be left in the image. Good idea. Because the image of her "butt crack" really stops me from seeing her as more than an accident victim.
And then there are the layouts of Jennifer Aniston and Joy Bryant, women who on most occasions are the epitome of Hollywood glamour. Not in these photos. The images of both women are so excessively airbrushed a reader can barely detect the outlines of their noses never mind anything else (and believe me my son tried). As a result the women look not so much ethereal as partially erased.
In almost every female image in this portfolio, famous women are either naked, partially naked, draped across cars like hood ornaments, or represented by random body parts. The best of the worst of this portfolio is the photograph of Hollywood plastic surgeon Garth
Fisher, who is pictured on a golf course standing next to a giant nipple holding his putter. I kid you not. In other layouts, disembodied female legs press against Topher Grace. Viggo Mortensen looks so uncomfortable playing with a couple of toes (without the woman they belong to in the image) one would think they were infected. George Clooney, sporting a demented Cecil B. DeMille expression, directs a gaggle of lingerie-clad women in Wellington boots, and even though many of us would gladly wear Wellington boots and stand knee deep in anything if Clooney asked, I hope you're noting a troubling theme emerge from this portfolio.
According to Ford's vision, and by association Vanity Fair's, women are not the sum of their parts. They are just the parts, and not even the good parts, like our brains and our hearts. In the end, when I finished reading this issue, I found myself feeling sorry for Ford. Is this really how he sees women?
On the other hand, maybe I'm reading too much into this portfolio. Maybe the entire layout is meant to project a degree of irony, some tongue-in-cheek action. Maybe Ford and Vanity Fair actually are satirizing what the culture of Hollywood does to women. Problem is, I just don't see it.