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Within Vanity Fair’s torrential contribution to the image stream, you can see how styles have changed. Image consultants and publicists are everywhere, trying to control things, even if Carter would have one believe that he can swat them away like flies. “We say this is what we’re offering: it’s a cover; and that’s just about it. We then go and do it.”

Annie Leibovitz often involves her sitters in a collaborative effort, their minders notwithstanding, and goes to extremes in the way she sets up a shoot, something that takes a combination of great ego and courage. She is a skilful negotiator in the uneasy mix, the minefield between photographic risk-taking and the magazine’s need to report the face. Her work often involves creating a believable fiction that does not necessarily relate to reality but rather the photographer’s effort at interpreting and amplifying the subject’s public image. Much of it is a performance, and for the epic group shots, the process is something akin to making a blockbuster movie in terms of the advance planning, the lighting, hair, make-up, costumes and the number of crew members involved in a big shoot.

Artifice is, of course, required to maintain a public persona. It was ever thus. “Slice the hips! That sag must go!” Cecil Beaton used to yell at his retouchers. Today, Mario Testino has a crack team working in his Paris studio tracing the spots, shadows and unwanted margins of fat that will be made to vanish. At a sitting he works by instinct, knowing he can tidy up the details later. His aim is to give his sitters that “temple of the gods” quality. “I try as much as possible to follow my first reaction on accepting a sitting and my initial feelings about the person,” says Testino. “When we get to the sitting I then have

to convey this idea to the sitter. Sometimes they might feel a bit uncomfortable and I must try to convince them otherwise or sometimes they may bring a helpful idea to the shoot. The poses are often in my mind beforehand. As for the Madonna shoot, I had worked many times with her before, so it was more of a collaboration. She was filming Evita at the time, so it became more about channelling this character she had within her. In Jennifer [Aniston]’s case, I wanted to show her very sexy American idol side, because it was just after her separation from Brad. I thought that pushing her image a bit, at that precise moment, would be good for her. This issue did very well. I think it is one of the best-sellers of Vanity Fair.”

Sex, as Friend points out, is humanity’s oldest sales tool. And sex, combined with a perfected Hollywood face, makes for the strongest, most recognisable currency in our celebrity-obsessed culture. This creates a Utopia of ever healthier, more beautiful flat-bellied and apparently thoroughly fulfilled professionals. But for all their image-enhancing powers, these photographers don’t always manage to hide the yearning in these brittle people, the perpetual pebble of dissatisfaction that still exists in a life lived in expensive handmade shoes.

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008, sponsored by Burberry, opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on February 14 and runs until May 26 (0870 0130703; www.npg.org.uk). The exhibition is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from June 14 to September 21 (www.nationalgalleries.org)

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