The Scarlett Johansson Problem

I somehow missed this when it came out, which is annoying. Craig McDean shot Scarlett Johansson for Vanity Fair and the photos are exactly right: technically controlled, warmer than they have any reason to be, the kind of magazine work where the subject looks like herself rather than like the issue she’s appearing in. McDean has that quality. He gives his subjects room.

Scarlett Johansson exists now in a category where the public image has grown too large to see through clearly—there’s the Marvel industrial complex version, the Woody Allen years everyone’s still arguing about, the fact that she was cast as a Japanese woman in a film that had no excuse not to know better. Somewhere underneath all of that is an actor who makes genuinely strange career choices and photographs extraordinarily well, which is more than most people manage.

The Vanity Fair shoot strips all that context away. McDean’s light, a studio, whatever time they had together. I didn’t read the interview. I never read the interview. Sometimes the picture is enough, and knowing what she said about it would only clutter the thing.