Picture Pages

From the Editors/Behind the Issue

Despite the scorching summer sun, a grand fireplace roared in Hollywood as Kristen Stewart arrived, with her dog Cole, at the Los Altos apartments for her Vanity Fair cover shoot. It's been nearly a decade since Stewart's first V.F. cover, and photographer Alasdair McLellan captured the occasion, "it's what I've always thought L.A. should look like, like the film Sunset Boulevard, and I could see Kristen hanging out there," says McLellan. "The location has an exotic history—Bette Davis lived there, even Hearst's mistress." (The haunted house turned out to be fitting for other reasons—read the profile of Stewart on page 116 to find out if she believes in ghosts.) Nostalgia inspired the process, as McLellan photographed exclusively on film rather than digital. "There's something exciting about the delay—you can be more focused on your subject in the moment."

Back on the East Coast, V.F. contributing photographer Annie Leibovitz captured journalist and, now, novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates, just days after he made the powerful case for reparations before Congress, in places of significance: on the Prospect Lefferts Gardens stoop of a friend from Howard University; then at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York's Morningside Heights, where Coates wrote much of his forthcoming novel, The Water Dancer. For the shoot, Coates dressed in the same suit he wore to the hearing on the Hill, and later an Ice Cube T-shirt of his own, proving that power-dressing is equal parts style and substance.

BRITT HENNEMUTH

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