Within two hours of offering $10,000 for unretouched images from Annie Leibovitz’s photography session with the HBO star, we received six allegedly unaltered images. As expected, they’re great — Lena looks fantastic. Aside from the obvious lighting tweaks that any publication would make, the unretouched images are pretty perfect. Which makes some of the adjustments — slightly narrowing a jaw or raising a waistline — seem that much more unnecessary. Why bother? These slight tweaks, the “you look great, but you’d look just a little more great if…” stuff is insidious.
But this is what Vogue does, and it’s interesting to see what Leibovitz and editor-in-chief Anna Wintour felt that they needed to “fix” before pictures of Lena could be presented to readers.