January 9, 2009
Miley Cyrus embarassed by Vanity Fair photo
When Sandy Napolitano saw the Vanity Fair picture of teen star Miley Cyrus' bare back, the West Islip mother said her first reaction was pity.
"I feel very sorry for the girl," said Napolitano, 53. "The adults in her life seem to be making poor judgments and letting her down."
Cyrus, 15, appears in the upcoming issue of the magazine draped in what looks like nothing more than a sheet and in another photo, she is leaning on her father. The singer-actress star of the Disney show, "Hannah Montana," issued a statement Sunday through her publicist expressing embarrassment over the photo shoot with renowned celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Cyrus said she expected the photos to be "artistic."
Napolitano said a 15-year-old is too young to know whether such a photo can be deemed artistic. "It's a very suggestive photo," she said.
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Her daughter, Dominique, 13, agreed. "I know a lot of girls look up to her as a role model," the eighth-grader at Udall Road Middle School in West Islip said. "She's too young. To be doing that at that age, I think it's wrong."
Super-fan Shlomit Azoulay, 14, said the photo doesn't diminish Cyrus as a role model. "I've always loved her," gushed the Roslyn Middle School student. "I love her show. I love her movies. I love her songs. She just looks like a fun, cool girl."
But she said the photo isn't appropriate for Miley's younger fans, some of whom are in preschool.
Azoulay's mother, Esther, 45, said she wouldn't let her aspiring actress-singer daughter pose for those kinds of pictures: "I don't know if I can call this girl a role model."
Susan Leach, a Huntington mother of two teenage girls who are Miley fans, called the photo exposing the star's back "a very classic, beautiful image."
"I'm sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted," Leibovitz said in a statement released by Vanity Fair. "The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful." A Disney network statement was critical of Vanity Fair, saying Cyrus was manipulated "in order to sell magazines."
More "peculiar," Leach said, was the photo of Miley and her father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. "That's not the typical way a 15-year-old would drape herself over her father."
One of Leach's daughters, Rebecca, 14, said the Vanity Fair photos are tamer than other images of Cyrus online. "Her MySpace pictures with just her in her underwear; I don't like those pictures," she said. "But with just her back showing, I think she looks pretty."
Hofstra English professor Paula Uruburu said the Miley photo shoot is an example of "sexualizing younger and younger girls" in the media. Uruburu wrote a book, "American Eve," to be released this week about Evelyn Nesbit, the Victorian-era teen model who was known for her affair with an older man, famous architect Stanford White. Nesbit, Uruburu said, represents the start of a national obsession with youth, beauty and sex.
"It's like a blueprint for everyone who followed after her," including Cyrus, Uruburu said. "Our culture tolerates and condemns it at the same time, almost with a wink."
This story was supplemented with an Associated Press report.
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