What We Can Learn from Annie Leibovitz’s Vogue Editorial of Adele

~Article by Danie Bester

Background: the rooms are doing work

Leibovitz did not simply find seven attractive backdrops.

The piano is the obvious choice, and the right one. Adele writes songs and sits at pianos, so it is not a prop, it belongs to her. Here we get a sliver of black and the edge of a keyboard. Plenty.

But notice what the piano is really doing in this photograph. It gives her somewhere to be, something to lean on, a reason to lift her chin and close her eyes. Put her against a plain grey background in the same dress and you would not get that head position, and without that head position you have very little.

That is the part worth holding on to. The background is not decoration. It is one of the six, and it works on the pose and the expression rather than sitting politely behind them.

The rooms themselves are grand but slightly tired: faded carpet, marked walls, furniture that has been sat on for a century. Success and history with the shine worn off. That suits her far better than a spotless set ever would.

Now here is the thing I most want you to take from this section. She does not blur any of it away. The carpet, the painting, the panelling and the piano all stay readable. That is a decision, and it runs against the reflex most of us have, which is to open the aperture as wide as it goes and melt everything behind the subject into a smooth wash.

A blurred background may put all the attention on the subject, but it often tells us little about the person. A chosen background does something different: it gives the portrait context, supports the pose, and helps explain who we are looking at. If the room is part of the story, do not blur it away. Let us see it.

A blurred background may isolate the subject, but a carefully chosen background can help tell us who the person is.

She could have moved in and made a lovely head-and-shoulders here. Instead she stood back and let the room speak. Adele looks calm, and also quite alone.

This one ties the setting to the person: manuscript paper, a pencil, a piano being used rather than posed against. Give somebody a real task and then interrupt it, and you get the turn of the body you see here. That is a directing technique, not an accident.

I am not going to turn every object into a symbol. The pencil is a pencil. But the choices add up.

Colour and composition: what holds the set together

Notice the colours. The reds keep returning, along with the golds, the greens and that warm old wood. It is a large part of why seven photographs feel like one piece of work rather than seven separate shoots. Colour is in the definition for a reason — it is doing structural work here, not just looking nice.

This was a team, of course — Tonne Goodman styled it, Mary Howard designed the sets. Every choice still served Adele.

Then there is the framing, and here is the most useful practical lesson in the whole set.

They shot in one hotel, and you have already seen the piano three times without seeing the same photograph twice. A tight profile. A wide frame with the chair, the carpet and the painting. A shoulder turned back towards us with music in front of her.

Then the same building gives us this.

We are outside now, looking in, and not particularly invited. Different mood entirely, same hotel.

The sofa does it too.

Compare that with the cover at the top. Identical sofa. There she is close, upright, looking straight down the barrel at us. Here she is stretched out, turned away, small inside a big frame.

The furniture didn’t change. What changed was the framing and the pose. That is the whole lesson.

Remember it the next time you are planning a shoot. You do not need six unrelated sets. One good room, worked properly, will give you more than six mediocre ones.

Light: it is not trying to impress you

I cannot tell you exactly how these were lit, and neither can anyone who was not standing there.

What I can tell you is what they look like. Leibovitz is well known for using broad, soft sources, and these photographs have that feeling: a large modifier, a big window, or something equally soft, with just enough fill to keep the shadows open. The real setup may well have been more involved. Claridge’s, a Vogue crew, Annie Leibovitz — I would not bet on simple. But the lighting is not pretentious or overwhelming. It does not look complicated, and that is the trick.

The light lands on Adele, wraps a little, then falls away into the room. Shadows are allowed to stay. Her skin still has texture. Nothing has been polished until the life has gone out of it. No clever rim light shouting for attention. No five-light setup asking to be admired.

There is a reason for that restraint. In this set, the light is not the star turn. It is the element that lets the other five be seen. The moment the lighting starts overperforming, everything else has to compete with it.

The light should serve the portrait, not ask to be admired. The moment the lighting starts overperforming, everything else has to compete with it.

So here is the line worth taking away: do not let your setup become proof of how clever you are with lighting. Photograph the person.

Pose and expression: the last two, and the quietest

Now go back through the previous photographs and look only at her face.

Here is what you will find, and it surprised me the first time I did it properly. The expressions are not that different. There is no big smile, no theatrical sadness, nothing you could point at and call a performance. She sits somewhere between calm and thinking in nearly every frame. The register barely moves.

So why does each photograph feel like a different photograph?

Because expression is never only the face. It is the tilt of the neck. Where the eyes go. What the shoulders are doing. Whether the hands are busy or resting. And it is everything around all of that — the room, the framing, the light.

Chin lifted and eyes closed at the piano, and it reads as absorbed. That same quiet face turned back over the shoulder with music in front of her, and it reads as interrupted. Lying back on the sofa with the eyes drifting off to the side, and it reads as unguarded. Straight down the barrel on the cover, and it reads as steady and entirely in charge.

One woman, roughly one expression, made to mean four different things by pose, framing and background.

This is exactly why expression sits last in the definition. It is the final culmination of a portrait, and everything else is preparation for it — but that cuts both ways, and the second half is the part we usually miss. You do not get the expression by concentrating on the expression. You get it from the room you chose, the light you put her in, where you asked her to sit, and what you gave her to hold.

Expression is the culmination of the portrait. You do not get it by staring only at the face; you get it from the room, the light, the pose, the framing and the direction.

Get the other five wrong and no expression will rescue the picture. Get them right and a small movement of the head is enough.

Watch her hands while you are at it. Fingers pushed into the hair, an arm draped over the back of a chair, a hand resting on the keys, a pencil held over a notebook. Hands and face work together. When the hands have a job, the face stops trying.

I want to be careful here. Absorbed, interrupted, unguarded — those are things the photographs suggest, not facts about what Adele was feeling that day. None of us were in the room. And none of it was necessarily relaxed either. There would have been a crew, a schedule, heavy clothing and a great deal of pressure. Photographs that look effortless are usually the result of patience, clear direction and a lot of frames.

A shoot does not have to feel effortless for the photograph to look effortless. Making that happen is our job, not the subject’s.

Back to your own portraits

Leibovitz has more technical ability than she needs here, and that is precisely why these work. She keeps it out of the way. What we are left with is the contemplation, the strength and the elegance of this woman as she saw her.

The goal was never simply to make Adele look beautiful. Plenty of photographers manage that. It was to make us feel we had seen something of the person behind the famous face — and she got there by putting six ordinary elements in the right relationship to each other, then leaving them alone.

That is what I want the mentorship group aiming at when we shoot our own editorial, and it is what I would want for your next portrait too. Not proof that you can light. Not proof that you can retouch. A set of photographs that hold together, with somebody real at the centre of them.

Do not make a portrait that proves how clever you are. Make one that leaves somebody real at the centre of it.

Have a proper look at the full editorial, slowly: Adele in Spring’s Fabulous Frocks, Vogue, March 2016

Then pull up your own recent portraits and run them past the definition. Light. Background. Colour. Composition. Pose. Expression. Which of the six were you actually thinking about when you pressed the shutter, and which ones simply happened to you?

That question has improved more portraits for me than any piece of equipment I have ever bought.

Photography: Annie Leibovitz. Fashion editor: Tonne Goodman. Set design: Mary Howard. Hair: Shay Ashual. Make-up: Mark Carrasquillo. Vogue, March 2016.

The definition of Portrait Photography in this article is the one we work from in the Basic Photography Course at DPC | Digital Photography Courses. The Portrait Mentorship Programme takes it further, one portrait category at a time — business, character, beauty, fine art, editorial — with real shoots and honest critique.