‘Was this all a charade?’: A photographer’s strange day with Elizabeth Holmes

EDITOR’S NOTE: In Snap , we look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.

When Benjamin Rasmussen arrived at Theranos’ headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to photograph Elizabeth Holmes in 2015, he wasn’t anticipating an unusual day. He was on assignment for Bloomberg Businessweek, for a cover story that was Holmes’ opportunity to respond to the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that first cast suspicion on her seemingly radical health-tech company. She was still years away from being charged and convicted for criminal fraud for claiming Theranos’ device could diagnose a spate of diseases with a finger blood draw, and, before her downfall,

Holmes was often photographed like a genius leader: heroic gaze, brightly illuminated face, stark black turtleneck. But Rasmussen and his assistant, Ryan Brown flew out with the directive to take simple portraits of her on a white backdrop, to try and get at the real her. What he got was much stranger.

In one of the images, Holmes stands stiffly in the foreground against long tables filled with equipment, wearing a pristine white lab coat over her signature dark turtleneck. She looks blankly off to the side as three scientists perform tasks behind her. When Rasmussen entered Theranos, he was directed toward this room, and it soon became clear that he was up against a PR team in crisis mode, he recalled. The decree was group portraits only — none of Holmes alone — with a very specific handful of people who were participating in the shoot.

“It was all women scientists,” he said. “It was this really hard pivot to (show) this was a team effort.”

Rasmussen is used to photographing celebrities, politicians and CEOs in restrictive situations where he has very few chances to reveal something genuine. After all, public figures are used to performing in front of the camera. To strip away the mask and let the real person emerge means creating a certain level of comfort for the subject and a sense of openness in the room, he said. Here, that wasn’t possible.

“When we walked into this space, we realized how much they were trying to control it,” he said. “You essentially have a whole series of directors who are trying to make sure that that character stays in place.”

Enough time has passed now for Rasmussen to share details from the day, which he called “unsettling.” Following cringe comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder’s recent surprise (and very tense) 1-minute trailer for a documentary he filmed with Holmes in the days before she began serving her 11-year sentence (releasing October 16), Rasmussen detailed his own experience to his followers on Instagram . But for more than a decade, as she was charged and put on trial — and even played by Amanda Seyfried in a Hulu rise-and-fall biopic — Rasmussen kept the images and story to himself, even though he had offers to license the images.

Larry Sultan/Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery/Casemore Gallery/Estate of Larry Sultan

The unassuming suburban homes that hosted and inspired porn sets

“I thought it was one thing for this to sort of exist in critical journalism circles, but it didn’t feel right,” he explained. “Her life is torn up enough from the decisions that she made, and I don’t particularly want to be part of like a broader kind of cultural shaming process of a person.”

Still, he explained, he looks back on the shoot and wonders what was authentic. He said he was given no information about the other women in the shoot, and the room they were in was messy and stacked high with cardboard boxes. The lab coat over the turtleneck seemed to him like a message about scientific rigor.

But for a lab setting, he recalled, “it didn’t seem like a particularly controlled environment.” He compared it to a shoot he did in a hospital setting for a story on its experimental treatments, where there were sterile rooms and gear checks and double-glove requirements. At Theranos, someone only warned them to wash their hands because of the “nasty stuff” in the room, he remembered. That stood out to him clearly in his mind because hours later, his assistant, Brown, was vomiting violently out of the car window on the way back to the airport. They still do not know whether to credit that to the sushi burritos they had for lunch or some other unknown variable.

Either way, Rasmussen jokes that it was karmic retribution for how they handled the shoot. Faced with the publicity team’s rules, he and his assistant had their own private crisis meeting and decided they were still going to try and get the cover shot. Told they couldn’t set up their white seamless background, they instead pulled the window blinds down and lit the room accordingly without sharing their plans. Over the course of the 20 minutes they had with Holmes, they shot group portraits and portraits of her interacting with the scientists, but slowly nudged her further down the tables toward the blinds and away from her colleagues. Brown popped up a reflector to hide their maneuvers, and they kept providing direction to the other scientists, who were no longer in frame. Eventually, they had enough space for Rasmussen to fire off a handful of standalone portraits for the cover (the eventual feedback from Theranos, he said, was not good.)

Looking back, Rasmussen said he’s used to working with internal teams who are focused on their own corporate messaging, who want to present a glossy view versus a critical gaze. But this shoot had him questioning, well, everything.

“You don’t kind of expect that the whole thing is a facade,” he said. “In hindsight, it’s been like, wait a second, was this all a charade?”

He thinks back to her demeanor, too, and wonders how she was feeling. She didn’t strike him as having a magnetism or a sense of command over the room. In many of the images, she has a deer-in-headlights expression, which he said is how it felt.

“She felt more like a character who was playing Elizabeth Holmes and less like this CEO, youngest self-made billionaire,” he said. (That same year, Forbes had named her as the youngest self-made female billionaire for the company’s $9 billion valuation).

At the time, there was no way for him to guess that it was the beginning of the end of Theranos. He filed the shoot away as a strange day and moved on until 2018, when she was arrested and charged, and then the puzzle pieces of the day began to click into place.

“I don’t know that in the moment I realized how much she had at stake,” he recalled. “The PR people didn’t know the extent of any of that as well, right? I think that the level to which everything crumbled, the only person in that room who knew how much it could fall apart was Elizabeth Holmes.”

编者按：在《快照》一书中，我们探讨了一张照片的力量，记录了现代和历史照片的制作故事。

2015年，本杰明·拉斯穆森抵达位于加州帕洛阿尔托的Theranos总部，准备拍摄伊丽莎白·霍姆斯时，他并未预料到这将是不同寻常的一天。他受彭博商业周刊委派，为一篇封面报道撰稿，而这篇报道正是霍姆斯回应《华尔街日报》重磅调查的机会。该调查首次让她的这家看似激进的医疗科技公司蒙上了阴影。当时，距离她因声称Theranos的设备只需抽取指尖血即可诊断多种疾病而被控刑事欺诈并定罪还有数年时间。在她身败名裂之前，

霍姆斯经常被拍成一位天才领袖：目光炯炯，面容光焕发，身着黑色高领毛衣。但拉斯穆森和他的助手瑞安·布朗奉命前往，为她拍摄一组白色背景的简单肖像，试图捕捉她真实的一面。然而，最终的成果却截然不同。

其中一张照片中，霍姆斯身着标志性的深色高领毛衣，外罩一件洁白的实验服，笔直地站在摆满仪器的长桌前。她目光呆滞地看向一旁，三位科学家在她身后忙碌着。拉斯穆森回忆说，他进入Theranos公司后，被引到这间房间，很快就意识到自己面对的是一个处于危机模式的公关团队。他们的要求是只拍集体照——不能有霍姆斯的单人照——而且只能和少数几位参与拍摄的人员一起。

“这全部都是女性科学家，”他说。“要转变观念，证明这是一项团队合作，真的非常困难。”

拉斯穆森习惯于在各种限制性环境下拍摄名人、政客和首席执行官，在这些环境下，他几乎没有机会展现他们真实的一面。毕竟，公众人物习惯于在镜头前表演。他说，要揭开他们的面具，让他们展现真实的自我，就需要为拍摄对象创造一定的舒适感，并在拍摄现场营造一种开放的氛围。而在这里，这一切都无法实现。

“当我们走进这个空间时，我们意识到他们试图控制它有多么严格，”他说。“基本上，有一整套导演都在努力确保这个角色保持不变。”

现在时间已经过去足够长了，拉斯穆森可以分享当天的细节，他称之为“令人不安”的经历。此前，以尴尬喜剧演员兼电影制作人内森·菲尔德发布了一段令人震惊（且气氛紧张）的1分钟纪录片预告片，该片记录了霍姆斯在服刑11年刑期前几天与她一起拍摄的场景（将于10月16日上映）。拉斯穆森随后在Instagram上向粉丝们详细讲述了自己的经历。但在霍姆斯被指控、受审的十多年里——甚至在Hulu出品的传记片中由阿曼达·塞弗里德饰演——拉斯穆森一直将这些照片和故事秘而不宣，尽管有人曾向他索要照片的使用权。

拉里·苏丹/图片由扬西·理查森画廊/卡斯莫尔画廊/拉里·苏丹遗产提供

那些不起眼的郊区住宅，竟成了色情片拍摄的场所和灵感来源。

“我觉得这种现象在批判性新闻圈里出现是一回事，但总觉得不太对劲，”他解释说。“她自己的决定已经让她的生活支离破碎，我不想参与到这种更广泛的、对她进行文化羞辱的过程中。”

不过，他解释说，回想起那次拍摄，他不禁会想，哪些是真实的呢？他说，拍摄时他完全不知道其他女性的情况，而且她们所在的房间很凌乱，堆满了纸箱。高领毛衣外面套着实验服，在他看来，这似乎是一种关于科学严谨性的暗示。

但他回忆说，就实验室环境而言，“感觉不像是一个特别受控的环境”。他将其与之前在医院拍摄的一篇关于实验性治疗的报道进行了比较，医院里有无菌病房、设备检查和双层手套的要求。他记得，在Theranos，有人只是提醒他们洗手，因为房间里有“脏东西”。这件事给他留下了深刻的印象，因为几个小时后，他的助手布朗在返回机场的车上，从车窗里剧烈呕吐。他们至今仍不确定这究竟是午餐吃的寿司卷饼造成的，还是其他未知因素导致的。

无论如何，拉斯穆森开玩笑说，这是他们拍摄方式的报应。面对宣传团队的规定，他和助理私下召开了一次危机会议，决定无论如何都要拍到封面照。他们被告知不能使用白色背景，于是拉下百叶窗，并相应地调整了房间的灯光，但没有透露他们的计划。在与霍姆斯相处的20分钟里，他们拍摄了集体照和她与科学家们互动的照片，但慢慢地引导她靠近桌子另一侧的百叶窗，远离她的同事。布朗架起反光板来掩盖他们的操作，他们则继续指导其他不在镜头内的科学家。最终，他们腾出了足够的空间，让拉斯穆森拍摄了几张封面单人照（他说，Theranos最终的反馈并不好）。

回想起来，拉斯穆森说他以前习惯与内部团队合作，这些团队专注于自身的企业宣传，想要呈现光鲜亮丽的形象，而不是进行批判性的审视。但这次拍摄让他开始质疑一切。

“你很难想象这一切都是一场骗局，”他说。“事后回想起来，感觉就像，等等，这一切难道都是一场闹剧吗？”

他也回想起她的举止，不禁思索她当时的感受。她给他的印象并非魅力四射或气场强大。在很多照片里，她都一副惊恐万状的样子，他说，那正是他当时的感受。

“她更像是扮演伊丽莎白·霍姆斯这个角色的人，而不是这位首席执行官，这位最年轻的白手起家亿万富翁，”他说。（同年，《福布斯》杂志将她评为最年轻的白手起家女亿万富翁，当时该公司估值达90亿美元。）

当时，他根本无法预料到这会是Theranos走向衰落的开始。他把这次拍摄事件当作一件怪事，并未放在心上，直到2018年她被捕并被起诉，那天发生的一切都开始真相大白。

“我当时并没有意识到她肩负着多大的责任，”他回忆道。“公关人员也不知道事情的严重性，对吧？我认为，当一切崩溃到那种程度时，房间里唯一知道事情会发展到何种地步的人就是伊丽莎白·霍姆斯。”