In 2010, Phillip Toledano photographed Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, for Raffi Khatchadourian’s Profile of the man, titled “No Secrets.” Toledano’s closeup portrait shows Assange with his chin lifted slightly, peering expectantly beyond the frame. His hair is white and his skin is pale, but there is a youthful keenness in his eyes. At the time, WikiLeaks, founded in 2006, was just a few years old. Toledano recalls Assange arriving for the picture-taking alone, with a rolling carry-on bag. When Toledano asked Assange about his apparent travel plans, he replied that he hadn’t made any—yet; the bag was a precaution, in case he had to take off unexpectedly.
Two years later, Assange took asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and he has not left since. Nadav Kander recently photographed him in a small room there, for Khatchadourian’s second Profile of Assange, “Man Without a Country,” which appears in this week’s issue of the magazine. Seen side by side, Toledano’s and Kander’s portraits illustrate the particular wear of the life Assange has lived for the past seven years. In 2010, Khatchadourian wrote that Assange “can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth.” Since then, the legal disputes, the unending political battles, and the physical isolation seem to have rounded the edge in his gaze.
Toledano remembers Assange being quiet and amenable in the studio. The man had an air of intrigue that Toledano sought to reproduce in the photograph in post-production. After the session, he pulled the portrait up on his computer screen and started re-photographing it over and over again until the digital moiré we see in the final image emerged. In the degraded photograph, streaks of color run down the right side of Assange’s face in a patchy pattern; even in print, he appears to be looking through a screen.
Because of Assange’s current situation, Nadav Kander’s session was much less flexible than Toledano’s. For most shoots, Kander prepares three separate lighting scenarios and, whether photographing on Capitol Hill or in a hotel meeting room, will work with as many as three assistants for several hours to assemble each of the setups before his subject arrives. But space and time at the Embassy in London were tight. After unloading equipment into the lobby of the building, he and his assistants presented their passports, entered through an armored door, and set to work preparing in a conference room. A large wooden table that could not be removed made the usual three-stage routine impossible. Instead, they would disassemble one scenario and then build the next over the course of the shoot. They were told they would have thirty minutes.
In Kander’s portrait, we see Assange in a gray shirt buttoned to the top. His white hair is tamed save for a few loose strands; stubble is coming in on his lip and chin. In his eyes, which look directly at the camera, there are small marks of light. In the 2010 Profile, Khatchadourian describes the “low-grade fever of paranoia” that hangs over Assange and his colleagues. That fever has since mixed with the conditions of confinement and an expanded, altered international reputation. The sureness we see in Toledano’s portrait seems to have been replaced by something less solid.
“The more I pare it down, the more you really see the condition of people,” Kander says, when describing his approach. His portraits rarely include environmental context—he aims to make pictures that focus on a person’s corporeal structure, his skin and bones. He’s interested in the physical facts that have been “etched” on the face, which he describes as “the truth about that person.” On set at the Embassy, he sensed that Assange, who can be particular about how his likeness is disseminated, felt safe. The allotted thirty minutes turned into two hours. “If people are very controlling of their image,” Kander said, “you get very few frames where they drop it. But when they do, for that second . . . you can really see it.”
