Our favorite New Yorker portraits of 2015 capture not only the vision of our photographers and the spirit of their subjects but also the insights and interpretations of our writers. Olaf Blecker’s portrait of Jenny Hval shows the Norwegian musician in yellow, stretched and perched like a canary, her avian pose suggesting what Anwen Crawford, in a review of Hval’s album “Apocalypse, girl,” called an “overlap of intimacy and unease.” In Jeff Brown’s photo of the German soprano Marlis Petersen, the singer’s ringletted head, caught in a slash of shadow, conveys what Alex Ross described, in his review of her performance in William Kentridge’s “Lulu,” at the Met, as an air “at once girlishly innocent and predatory.” In some pictures, famous figures show less-familiar sides: Graeme Mitchell, for Zadie Smith’s story “Brother from Another Mother,” captured the chameleon comics Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele looking uncharacteristically plain-faced, with just a hint of mischief betrayed in Key’s elastic eyebrows. Elsewhere, unfamiliar personalities are brought vividly into view, as in Katy Grannan’s spare portrait of Megan Phelps-Roper, whose astonishing story of conversion by Twitter Adrian Chen wrote about recently in his story “Unfollow.”
Reported by The New Yorker 12 hours ago.
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