Well, if there’s one thing I hate more than entitled artists, it’s entitled monarchs. I’m gonna go with Leibovitz on this one.
Exactly. I’m a musician, and there’s a fine line that artists have to walk with their patrons. They may be putting up the big bucks, but they also rarely know your job better than you do. Sometimes it’s worth it to kow-tow a little bit, and other times it’s necessary to assert yourself. The more wealthy/powerful a client is, the more important it can be to remind them that you’re there to provide a professional service, and they ought to let you do that.
If I were a photographer and was hired to take a picture, and my subject refused to pose in a certain way, or change an article of clothing (assuming it wasn’t a question of decency), you bet I’d insist on it.
If an artist spends his or her whole life deferring to those in positions of power, he or she will never earn respect or success as an artist.
I’m not saying she deserves respect just for being the queen but I was raised to respect my elders and respect people in their own home.
Also, I think I would be pretty peeved if I had to get all dressed up in some annoying fancy duds for someone visiting my home and then have them decide that I needed to remove an item that I had just painstaking attired myself with and removing it would mean I’d need to fix my hair again and the *guest in my home * started getting cheeky with me about it because I balked at the idea.
So maybe she thinks she’s entitled but I can’t help but sympathize with the queen in this case.
A professional photographer hired to do a portrait is not a guest in your home, and not just visiting your house. It’s not like she was over for tea, decided to snap some pics, and insisted you rearrange your home to do so.
Didn’t see the Walters segment. Didn’t see the clip seen by the OP. Any possibility that matters of how her Majesty was to be addressed by the photographer had been settled beforehand?
Assuming the clip seen by the OP is the one where Liebowitz “upsets” the Queen, this has subsequently been shown to be creative editing by the BBC, and in fact Her Maj didn’t storm out in the way implied by the clip. The BBC issued a formal apology.
If you’re paying someone to do a job in your home you’re probably expecting even more respect from them.
I can’t watch youtube but I saw clips of this on the news and maybe I missed something but I don’t really think Leibovitz was rude. However, I think Leibovitz could have handled it better, she should have been aware that the queen was cranky to begin with, the queen obviously wasn’t happy having to get all dressed up for a few pictures and she’s an old lady and yes, she does expect a certain level of respect. For a professional who works with a lot of famous people you’d expect that Leibovitz would be a little better at handling divas.
This one is shown with the correct timeline, so there’s no implication that the Queen stormed out as a result of the comment (rather, she’s shown storming in, which you’d think sane people would take as a clue that perhaps Leibowitz wasn’t at fault here, but apparently not). Zabali, here’s the clip.
If you pay a professional photographer to come in to your home and take pictures of you, then act bitchy when they express an opinion on what the photograph should be like (in other words, do their job), perhaps you’re the one at fault, whether you’re the Queen or not.
In any case, Leibowitz is known for her collaborative style, working closely with her subjects, so a time-limited confrontational session with an overprivileged crank may indeed have been fairly new territory for her. Blame the people who booked her, in that case. If they wanted a “yes ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full ma’am” creep then they should’ve hired one. No shortage of obsequious shutterbugs with arguably more technical prowess than Leibowitz out there.
I find it fascinating how much Barbara Walters and her guest seemed to give a shit about this two minutes of video clip and the insight it allegedly brings to the Royal Family.
I think the Queen should be honored, yeah, just for being Queen. If that’s what her nation wants, it should be respected. But I also think if you hire someone for their expertise, you should let them do their work. Lebovitz was just doing her job. She could have done it more tactfully, but she would know better than the Queen what looks good in a photo, no? If I hire someone for the quality of their work, I would know better than to stand in the way of that work.
Old people can be cranky. Sometimes it’s not always their fault, especially if some dementia is involved. Yeah, cranky, grouchy old people can be funny and/or annoying, especially when there is no good reason for them to be acting that way but I was raised to treat them with respect and compassion anyway, because some day that could be me and that’s how I would hope to be treated.
Maybe because I had a grandmother that slipped into senile dementia and my mother now suffers from Alzheimer’s and I see many other people at the nursing home that get cranky for no good reason and I wouldn’t dare dream of treating them with any disrespect because of it that my sympathies lie with the old lady. The queen is almost 82 years old, the odds of there being some dementia going on are pretty high.
But maybe she’s always been cranky and nasty, I don’t know. Maybe she thinks she’s just entitled to be cranky because she’s the freakin’ queen, I don’t know. I do know that when one deals with someone of a certain they should probably expect some crankiness or stubbornness and the best way to deal with it is to be flexible. Do what they want or make them think what you’re doing is their idea. Leibovitz had forewarning that the queen was in a foul mood by the way she entered the shoot and she probably could have handled it better.
So basically, I sympathize with the queen because she’s an old lady, not because she’s the queen.
I keep trying to picture what would happen if I went to my mom’s nursing home and made her dress up in fancy robes to have her picture taken.
Trust me, we don’t give a shit. I mean, okay, if someone grabbed her bum at a function or used one of her cake hats as a frisbee then there might be some mild fulmination, but mostly we’d like people to stop caring about them because then maybe we’d get some peace and quiet. At least, that’s how I feel, and all right-thinking British “subjects” should agree with me.
Far more worrisome in that video was Barbara Walters’ face. It could stun deer at fifty paces, I’m sure.
Well no, hence the sentence at the end of that paragraph. However, I truly don’t believe that anyone I’ve ever met would genuinely think that this clip showed anything but a mild misjudgment of the Queen’s mood. I don’t think anyone would even be showing this were it not for the BBC editing drama. Even your fervent monarchists surely believe the Queen is made of sterner stuff than to be genuinely upset by a request to take off her tiara.
We’re far more likely to be insulted by slurs against real ale than the Queen, put it that way.
Indeed. I just find it slightly freaky that the older certain media celebrities get, even as you’d expect them to be less and less surprised by anything, their expressions seem to calcify into rictuses of pure astonishment.
Annie handled it fine. She had one idea of how she wanted to take the photo. The Queen had another. And they compromised taking some pictures with the tiara on, and a bunch with the tiara off. There was very little “weird” going on in that photo shoot. Every so often you get a subject that doesn’t quite trust your instinct, and part of being a photographer is negotiating the situation so that you and the client get what you want. Some people of power simply hand over their trust 100% to you, others like to micromanage. If you know what you’re doing, you have to tread a fine line where you somewhat indulge the client’s wishes even though you know there’s a better picture. I’ve had clients say they want this picture, that picture, etc., and I’ll do my best to get them those photos, but the photos they end up loving the most are the ones, frankly, where I controlled the content. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Queen ends up liking the un-tiaraed pictures better in the end.
It was late. It wasn’t earth shattering. Annie Leibovitz’ attitude bothered me. It still does, kind of. There have been some interesting points posted here, and I like to see who takes what side based on where they live, etc. The only remark here that really pissed me off was the entirety of this post. I SAID that I’d be happy to be corrected on factual stuff because I’m NOT an expert. Hell, as far as the modern incarnation of the family, I gave my uneducated take on it and thought I made that clear. Listen, Una, your tone pisses me off. No need to be snide. Where did I say that one person equals the whole? I said that this was one example of why Americans look like oafs to the rest of the world. Did I really need to flesh out for you the caveat that ok, the WHOLE world doesn’t really think that, and A.L. is not representative of everybody here, but someone in a country that is not this one somewhere looked at that and said, “Stupid Americans!”
Yep, we get to be equals here. We get to believe that. Anybody who thinks so is a little deluded or has never worked for someone else, or been made to be polite to someone of a higher station in life just for the sake of social grace. It’s for the same reason that we are compelled to address our current leader as Mr. President. Hell, I think he’s a total dipshit not worthy of the office, but even I would address him as Mr. President. It’s kind of the same thing here.
I have no argument against those who have the opinion that A.L. was there at the behest of the palace, was doing her job, and therefore has some right to call the shots. I can’t really argue with that. What I take issue with was three things:
No show of common sense at all with regard to what she was getting when she asked for a particular costume.
Her tone of voice sucked.
If you don’t think the office she holds deserves respect, m’kay, that’s fine, but the woman is an old lady. Doddering old fool she may be, but still your elder, and you moderate your speech accordingly.
Eonwe, I get you. Great point. I can’t really argue with that, either.
jjim, it IS a storm in a teacup. No big deal with regards to the world, I’ll admit. I apologize for bitching up the link, but I thought the point of it was to show that the story that Elizabeth stormed out wasn’t true.
What it comes down to is that A.L. sounded like a fishwife (which may be her manner, I don’t know) in a situation that called for more decorum than I thought she payed. This isn’t so much about the Queen for me as it is the idea that another American behaved stupidly in a social situation that got some face time with the rest of the world. You can say that it has no bearing on what other people think of us, and you’d be right if you said it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks in the grand scheme of things, but some of us are as tired of being thought of as classless rubes as some of the French are at being thought of as cheese eating surrender monkeys, or Middle Easterners being thought of as suicide bombing savages. Thinking people do not apply the perception of a group one belongs to to that individual. Many people do not practice that.
Boy, was I ever wrong. The clip is nothing like the OP’s description. The photographer is perfectly deferential. I thought both she and the Queen behaved normally.
Wow. You and I must be watching a different clip, because I saw none of those problems in the clip. I don’t think Annie was disrespectful in the least. I don’t think there was any problem with her “tone.” She was professional, to-the-point, and working against a VERY tight deadline. If anything, her tone was a little hurried. The Queen didn’t sound pissed off , either, just a bit taken aback by the (unexpected) request. That’s all. Both parties handled it fine. If you think Annie is somehow being disrespectful or this somehow shows Americans are classless rubes well, you’re being hypersensitive.
