The Walrus faster off the mark with Queen's cover portrait
Just before Christmas, the Sunday Times magazine in Britain ran as its cover an image of Queen Elizabeth II by expat Canadian photographer Chris Levine. It was pointed out on the blog Read This that the same image had been used by the Telegraph magazine earlier in the 2009.
However they were both pipped at the post by The Walrus, which used the image in its December 2007 issue.
According to an interview with Levine in Creative Review, he took the holographic portrait of the Queen in 2004, on a commission from the Jersey Heritage Trust to mark 800 years of the island's loyalty to the Crown.
The image was a transmission stereogram and involved capturing the subject using a specially commissioned video camera that moved along a linear rail taking a sequence of 200 images. The final images were selected with Her Majesty and then translated into a large format hologram in the US....I had two sittings with her at Buckingham Palace and two private one-on-one audiences with her to show her the work in progress. The first sitting was fraught: there were technical problems and I was extremely nervous about meeting her. However, it all worked out and she took a personal interest in the project. She is an extraordinary woman with a unique life experience and I felt a real affection towards her.Levine's own website says the portrait is available for purchase as a 16" x 20" giclee print for £1,500. Which makes the print of the cover image offered by The Walrus unframed 21.5" x 28.5" for $199 Canadian seem like a real bargain.
posted by D. B. Scott at
10:00 am
5 Comments:
The Italian magazine IL has also used it as a cover:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ffranchi/sets/72157609430306438/
Somehow I don't think the Times and the Telegraph are in a race with The Walrus. But hey, thanks for maintaining that Canuck tradition of seeking validation from without.
I gather you are maintaining some other kind of tradition -- sniping from the bushes.
Actually, the story was the opposite of seeking validation since, in this case, it's unnecessary. Merely pointing out that The Walrus was among the earliest to use the image.
The Walrus cover with the Queen also won a Silver National Magazine Award for 2007.
Yeah I am not sure why it won a silver. There was no concept behind it... they merely picked up a photo that was already used somewhere else and pawned it off as their own. The Walrus tends to do that a lot... don't think we should be rewarding the magazine for creativity when they aren't being creative.
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