What’s Up With This Year’s Surreal White House Christmas Portrait?
Melania Trump just posted this year’s White House Christmas portrait, and the optics of the annual holiday photo have a certain surreal quality. The photo, which was reportedly snapped before the first couple headed to the Congressional Ball last Saturday, shows FLOTUS and POTUS looking almost like cardboard cutout versions of themselves. And they are very, very smiley—despite this season of indictments, and the dissolution of their flagrantly fradulent charity organization. They are also holding hands, a move that is famously out of character for them. We asked resident Vogue art experts to weigh in on what could be happening in this festive portrait, and why it feels so strangely off.
Switching up last year’s black ensemble for a white one, Melania Trump wears a sequin Céline dress, while Donald Trump dons his usual Mar-a-Lago look, a chin-cinching tuxedo. For the second year in a row, the couple’s son, Barron, is not pictured, but even more notably missing from the setup are the blood-red trees Melania Trump shared in the White House Christmas decorations video earlier in the month. (Perhaps because of the immediate online comparisons between them and the dresses in The Handmaid’s Tale?) They instead opted to pose in Cross Hall, a room that has been filled with Christmas trees that have been laden with red Christmas balls around their stumps.
Video: A Look at White House Christmas Decorations Through History
But why do we get the distinct feeling that we’re being greeted by wax statues? “It’s how they’re lit versus the lighting in the space,” Vogue.com’s Visual Director Emily Rosser explained. “It makes them look like cutouts.” She thinks both Trumps have been slightly de-oranged (compared to other photos of them from that night’s Congressional Ball) by the intense lighting in the photo.
Vogue.com’s Senior Designer Durrant Santeng says that without bokeh (the practice of blurring the background of a photo so that its subjects stand out), “the President and First Lady are competing with their decorations.” Instead, he notes, the lighting is “very overdone.”
Things get even more complicated when you consider the portrait that Melania Trump posted on her own Instagram account differs from the official portrait photos: FLOTUS seems to have used a filter to slightly yellow and blur the image. Photographer and frequent Vogue contributor Daniel Arnold says that such a choice could be an effort “to reinforce an illusion of reality” and that “they blurred the whole thing to create a false uniformity,” especially if the couple was, in fact, superimposed onto the background from another image. “If I were editing and I were ever to do a bad job and it looked fake, I would blur the whole thing.”
One thing’s for certain: It was only last week that the news broke that the White House would not be holding its usual holiday party for the press. As former Trump White House associates continue to fall like snowflakes on a winter day in the Mueller investigation, the wildly sunny White House Christmas portrait might be another attempt to keep spirits looking bright.
