tangerine trees and marmalade skies

Sean Lennon and Girlfriend Recreate John and Yoko Rolling Stone Cover

sixtyfour:

delayprocrastinate:

twentyfourbit:

…with a twist. Sean Lennon and model girlfriend Kemp Muhl have recreated Annie Leibovitz’s iconic 1981 Rolling Stone cover photo of a naked John Lennon, his legs curled around his wife, Yoko Ono (see below). The photograph, taken by Terry Richardson for Purple magazine’s fall issue, has Muhl taking the place of Lennon the Elder, while Ono is played by Lennon the Younger.  Click here for the full pic (mildly NSFW).

lame re-do. only makes you go, “uh… that’s it?”.

Wow, so stupid.

A few things:

1. He’s actually redone this photo before. With a different woman. See? I told you. This older photo creeped me out big time when I first saw it, and I think with decent reason.

2. The fact that he has done the photo again creeps me out even more. Seriously, it does. I don’t want to go around analyzing Sean, and no one could blame the dude for having some issues work out. Like, whoa. But. This seems to be a very, very odd way of working out his issues with the loss of his father, and while it is quite possibly entirely inappropriate of me, I feel genuinely kind of concerned for him.

3. I hate that if they were going to redo the shot at all, they had to make it “sexy.” Fuck. That. The original photograph is one of the most moving, tender, intimate moments every captured on camera. To turn it into “OMG hot” is just really, really gross.

4. The fact that in most redos I see of this photograph, the gender roles are reversed, is telling to me. There is something slightly startling about John & Yoko’s photograph. He’s naked and she’s fully clothed? No, it’s backwards! It goes against everything we know about traditional gender roles and how those roles are portrayed in the media. The photo transgresses on several levels: it shows a man naked with a clothed woman, it shows a man in a vulnerable position and clinging to a woman for love and support, and it depicts nudity without being sexual. And that’s just on top of what the photo means to us fans. Most remakes of the photo seem to want to “right” these “wrongs.” It speaks of insecurity to me, not to mention the inability of most people to see/show a naked female body in a non-sexual light.