![]() “There was something quite charming about the worrying in the pit of your stomach, that you didn’t know whether you had anything.‘I felt like there was something missing in life’ … Streten at home. But it was a world that was not at all a sure thing,” Burnett says. “It was a combination of you didn’t know what you had and you didn’t know what you had missed. This isn’t just a picture that Burnett could never imagine. It later ran in TIME, in 2005, the year when Plame left the CIA and when Scooter Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was indicted. News, by his account, was no longer interested. Wilson was quoted at the time saying the pictures, made a month after Burnett’s, “should not be able to identify her, or are not supposed to.”īurnett saw the image and thought, “well, if she’s posing for Vanity Fair, I guess it’s ok,” and he and his agency looked to publish his image. The White House is visible in the background. On the opening spread, Plame - styled with big sunglasses that shielded her face and a headscarf around her blond hair - is in the passenger seat of a convertible driven by Wilson. In its January 2004 issue, Vanity Fair published a feature on Wilson and Plame with photographs by Jonas Karlsson. News ran a different one, slugged “ANGRY HUSBAND.” Plame did not return a request for comment. He and Wilson made “a kind of gentleman’s agreement” that the picture wouldn’t be published while she was still at the agency. “That was the hardest thing,” Burnett admits, “knowing there was a story out there and holding on to the picture.” Wilson, who Burnett says wasn’t shown the image, outlined how releasing it then could be problematic for Plame, who still worked at the CIA. At one point, he called Wilson and talked it out. Still, Burnett understood the sensitivities around publishing it. “It was an accident, but sometimes accidents are the best pictures.” “I have absolutely no memory of ever seeing her,” he says. “I saw this astonishing vision of Joe sitting on the sofa, and Valerie had come in as if she was trying to remember something,” he says, “and then she just turned around and walked out.” A contact sheet of 11 images reveals only one that includes Plame. When Burnett returned around 4 p.m., he was stunned. At one point, he remembers, “I shot four or five frames of him without really looking up.”Īfterward, he dropped the film off at the lab for processing. Once Burnett had Wilson in the frame and began shooting with the Holga, he paid closer attention to winding the film to the right number than to actually looking at what he was capturing. It was crucial with a Holga to not over-wind or under-wind the film. In what he describes as “this kind of allergic reaction” to the newer cameras, he had brought an old Speed Graphic 4×5, on a tripod, and a small, cheap, plastic Holga that required its film to be wound after each picture. This was at the point when digital photography was “just grabbing hold of everything,” Burnett says. Wilson sat on the couch as Burnett set up one of his cameras. Joe’s right in here in the living room.’”īars of light streamed through the trees, hitting the window and wading into the room. ![]() “I was like, ‘You must be Valerie, hello.’ And she said ‘yeah, come on in. “The door opens and there’s Valerie Plame in her bathrobe who’s down in the kitchen getting her little kids ready for school,” he tells TIME. Plame hadn’t yet been photographed, and on this October day, that wasn’t Burnett’s intent. The outlet agreed, and that same week he showed up to the family’s home in Washington, D.C. “I said, ‘You need to have me photograph him,’” Burnett, a cofounder of the Contact Press Images agency, recalls he told U.S. News coverage kicked into overdrive as investigations into one of the 21st century’s biggest national security scandals sought to unravel the chain of the disclosure: who had done what, at which levels of government, and why. 27 at age 69, considered the leak to Novak an act of retribution. In an interview with TIME then, Wilson said that was “bullsh-t” and “a smear job.” Shortly afterward, Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a Central Intelligence Agency “operative on weapons of mass destruction.” The columnist Robert Novak, citing that two Bush administration officials had leaked Plame’s identity to him, wrote that Plame had suggested sending her husband to Africa.
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