Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed.
Since Obama has expressed admiration for the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that Doris Kearns Goodwin paints in 'Team of Rivals,' he could do the 16th president one better: He should name Hillary Clinton as his running mate in 2012. That would be both needed change and audacious.
To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.
In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.
I became a fashion designer by accident. I loved to make portrait drawings when I was a teenager, and from that came the interest in what people were wearing and why they were wearing it.
I've always had a healthy disregard for authority - it allows me to do my job as a portrait photographer and not as someone who is playing the power game.
I first thought about doing a project about Anna Wintour and 'Vogue' when I read an article in 'New York Magazine' about the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball, the annual fundraising gala that Anna oversees. It created such a fascinating portrait that I couldn't help but be compelled.
In 'Where the Air is Clear', Carlos Fuentes composed a polyphonic portrait of Mexico City amid the growth and modernization brought on by the economic boom of the 1950s. The novel can be read as a jazz interpretation - free and in a Mexican key - of John Dos Passos' 'Manhattan Transfer'.
The important thing is for the characters to feel real, and to be given the humanity they are due. That granting of humanity is what separates a full portrait from a stereotype.
