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I haven’t read this Vanity Fair article about Mad Men, since I’m still on the second season and am loathe to have plot points spoiled for me. But it was hard not to notice Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Jon Hamm and January Jones that heads the article. I was instantly amazed by this image and its aggressive, artless postprocessing. Note in particular the obvious compositing and over-the-top shadow and highlight push and pull — as if the faux-HDR aesthetic were really worth emulating in portraiture.

Leibovitz has apparently either missed or ignored the negative critical reaction to her woefully gauche “Romulus and Remus” photo for Lavazza. In any case, I am truly impressed by a photograph of two people as striking and attractive as Hamm and Jones that renders its subjects so flat, synthetic, and lifeless. Perhaps this was the aesthetic goal — to render the actors as if they were only apparently in the same place and soul-dead automata. But it is possible to make an evocative photograph that depicts a Mad Men actor in a way that both alludes to the events of the show and isn’t ugly.

UPDATE (9/6/2009): David Hobby calls this photograph “subtle and beautiful.” I genuinely regard this as an indictment of my photographic taste. Also, apparently Leibovitz didn’t even take that Lavazza photo herself. Yikes.