As if there exists an alternative argument to be made, Britain’s Guardian wonders aloud whether Vanity Fair, prone to give covers only to celebrities carrying untold sob stories, is merely a glossier downmarket celeb rag that’s actually on par with the Us Weeklys of the world.

Even Graydon Carter’s brand extensions – the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, the Waverly Inn – are brash excuses to traffic in celebrity.

VF’s entrée into the National Portrait Gallery is the newspeg here; the walls are adorned with the magazine’s celebrity portraits, with much owed to Annie Leibovitz’s constantaly resigned contract.

The image seems camp - a parodic rendering of the Aryan ideal - until you compare it with Martin Munkacsi’s 1931 image of Leni Riefenstahl skiing uphill. Refreshingly, the film-maker’s athleticism is contextualised rather than merely displayed. Her discomfort makes us think about the personal cost of this gravity-defying drive to perfection. Compared with this, the Schwarzenegger picture is a straightforward piece of fascist iconography. We read it as ironic because we can’t believe Leibovitz can be serious. “I’m very serious about what I do,” she says, in a recent film about her life. The atmosphere on the shoots featured in Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens bears this out. They have become more elaborate and less fun, one imagines, for the participants. Standing for hours in itchy 18th-century wigs while this self-confessed aesthete finds the right configuration for your limbs must be a bore but none of the young actors would dream of complaining. The promise of immortality gives Leibovitz a godlike power. She can be as terse-lipped as she likes, as long as she retains the power to redeem the chosen from the thing they fear most. [Guardian]