Oprah Power

Full force?

Oprah gracing the covers of September's O Magazine
(as she does every single issue), with the caption,
"You're stronger than you know. How to tap into
your true power and really make it work for you."

One of my interests is to understand and deconstruct images - whether they be artistically composed (paintings, illustrations, textile designs, etc.), or images that are photographic or film shots, which are often not as meticulously composed from scratch, like paintings and illustrations, but which the lens tries to capture from the world around us.  

Sometimes, these "documentary" images are more interesting than the carefully planned paintings, since they reveal inadvertent movements and expressions, and show us a deeper "picture" than what the photographer (or the subject) expects us to see.

Here is one such of Oprah (see above image). Now, this is a planned, staged photo shoot. But the photographer, Birgitte Lacombe, writes in the September issue of O Magazine which features this photo on its cover:

Oprah is powerful, yet she wears her power lightly. That's what I was out to capture. She looks in control, but not in an aggressive way. It's a more introspective kind of power.

Lacombe was going for power, "but not in an aggressive way." Either she's a very bad reader of human expression, or her idea of a power look is the insecure, hesitant and certainly non-powerful expression that Oprah has in the photo. Given her own explanation of power, I would say the latter comes closer to Lacombe's intentions. 
 
Here's what Oprah herself has to say:

When your life is on course with its purpose, you are your most powerful.

This new-agey type of thinking comes from Oprah's now famous association with the spiritual movement "The Secret," whose founder/discoverer Rhonda Byrne, says:

What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want, and that is based on what we're thinking and feeling.

Oprah recently announced that she had become depressed, and was unable to control her weight. Her medical doctor attributed it to a thyroid problem, but her problem seems bigger, and deeper, than that. If pictures say anything, I would interpret her expression in the photo above as someone doesn't attract into her life the things she wants, which is certainly not a powerful condition.

There's a lot to speculate on this "weakness" of Oprah. One thing I'll say is that the world that Oprah says she's so in tune with, the life which is "on course with its purpose," isn't happening. She has taken a false path somewhere.