Homage or Ripoff--Perry Reshoot Annie Photo

The current issue of Vanity Fair has a photo you may recognize. The double-truck image (below) shows the cast of Olliver Stone's new biopic about the president, titled "W." (That's actor Josh Brolin as President George W. Bush, along with Richard Dreyfus as Dick Cheney and Thandy Newton as Condi Rice.) The photo was taken by portraitist Nigel Perry. The caption says only that the  cast was posed "in an echo" of a famous Vanity Fair cover from 2002, featuring the actual Bush and his cabinet.
    I find it very odd that the magazine doesn't mention that the original photo (above) was made by Annie Leibovitz, its star photographer.
    I'm betting the magazine asked Annie to re-create her own photo and that she said no. Whereupon they hired someone else to do it. But shouldn't they have given a more fulsome  credit to their own photographer?--David Schonauer

Comments

[Chris Oquist]

This seems similar to 3M stealing the Post-It-Notes on a Jaguar idea from an amateur photographer and "re-shooting" his work themselves (which I wrote about on my blog) - shades of copyright infringement all over the place, but maybe it's different when both photographers are working for you?

By the way, doesn't that original Leibovitz shot look like the back of a West Wing DVD box set or something?