Some thoughts on the Glee GQ Photo shoot with Terry Richardson

So this has been getting alot of buzz in the news, but I don’t see much in the way of background, so I thought I would add some:

I stopped reading GQ decades ago, but fashion shots of men well dressed accompanied by women barely dressed is something they’ve been doing since the 80s.  You may not agree with it — I think it feeds into the “Axe” dream that young men have — but it is not something new. And young men are the audience of GQ magazine. Indeed, with the advent of “lad” magazines like Maxim and the like, there are more of these photos, not less.

Terry Richardson, the photographer, has been shooting photos like this for along time. I think he is a great photographer technically, and he is at his best when his subjects manage to combine glamour and trash (e.g., Lindsay Lohan). These photographs don’t work for me because I think of the Glee actors as neither glamourous nor trashy. And they echo the American Apparel ads, and that is tired in so many ways. I found the shoot disappointing. (You might say: there are women standing around in their underwear?! But I see women standing around that way in the La Senza shop next to the grocery store in the mall every day. I understand the general problem: I just don’t think GQ is exceptional.)

For the Glee cast, as actors, especially TV actors, I think this could be a good career move for them, because it allows them to potentially break out of the typecasting box that TV actors get put into. Hollywood actors making moves like this is nothing new, either.

All that said, I can see why people would be upset, both because of the imagery of the photographs and the messing around with the associations that people have of these actors. But there is nothing new or exceptional here, unless you’ve been living under a rock. Maybe if I was a big Glee fan, which I am decidedly not, I would feel different.

If you want to be outraged and / or see more of the photos, you can see alot of them at the Mail Online (which is comprehensively trashy), or you can make Conde Nast happy and buy a copy of GQ.