Annie Leibovitz Makes a Young Girl’s Dream Come True
People are missing the point.
photo used with permission: FinalPixxx/Newscom
There’s a lot of buzz out there about a recent photo shoot that Julianne Moore did with Annie Liebovitz. The subject was Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and the copper-haired beauty was perched on a rock complete with a large rubber tail. Ms. Liebovitz has been doing a series of portraits like this, with people like Jessica Biels as Pocahontas. “It is about bringing great stories to life,” Leibovitz has been quoted as saying. “Working with great actors – these are stories that they know. It’s embedded in them. And when they start to have their own children it means even more to them.” Emphasis added by me.
See, that’s the thing. There’s been articles about Annie Liebovitz, interviews with Julianne Moore, and profiles of the Swimmer of the Year Michael Phelps who played one of the mermen in the same shoot. It was a new experience for him to be part of a “fantasy” shoot, and I agree, it’s a pretty neat thing. I remember when Madonna’s “Cherish” video came out, how much I was entranced by the actual flippers on the actors.
But that added emphasis is what the real story is, to me. Leibovitz accounts: “There’s a moment in the shoot where Julianne is sitting on a rock in her mermaid tail and her young daughter comes in, and there is not a dry eye in the house. She sat in her mother’s lap. Her jaw just dropped. She could not believe her mother was Ariel.”
That’s the story here. That thousands of dollars were spent to make art, that it was an unusual confluence of stage, screen, athletics, and fine art, that Julianne Moore and Michael Phelps are breathtaking (no pun intended) in the underwater scene, that’s all just fine. But the fact that a little girl had an unforgettable moment, that she got to see her Mom become her favorite character – that’s where the real magic is, in my opinion. With all the talk these days about people needing therapy to get over their parents – it’s nice to see someone, for a change, doing something that will have a lasting positive effect on the child.
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