C.J. Burton Reveals How He Created His Viral Donald Trump Cover for Newsweek

C.J. Burton Reveals How He Created His Viral Donald Trump Cover for Newsweek

Earlier this year Newsweek ran a cover featuring everyone's favorite president to hate as their cover, depicting him lazily hanging out in the oval office pounding back the calories in about the least presidential way possible. Newsweek contracted legendary conceptual photographer C.J. Burton to create this inevitably notorious cover. Naturally, Burton quickly realized there would be no chance of him getting access to either Trump or the Oval Office for such a shoot so needed to leverage the power of compositing to create the image desired by the client.

In his livestream from Creatr's new From Concept to Cover weekly livestream series, Burton walks viewers through the entire process of creating an image like this. Beginning from pre-concept and brainstorming with the client's creative team, to the shoot itself, and finally, through the entire Photoshop process, Burton lays out his entire workflow that was able to transform a vague idea from the client to a polished final image. 

As can be expected Burton worked through many iterations of a similar idea before settling on a final concept which he worked with a creative team to build into a real photo. By leveraging the power of publicly available stock imagery and a scratch built set Burton was able to build an image of Trump without ever needing to photograph the president himself. An image constructed this way, however, certainly raised many ethical questions about whether it is ok to create an image of anyone, let alone a world leader, doing something that almost certainly never occurred. In an era where fake news has quickly become a cancer in our society. Has a moral line been crossed in constructing a completely CG image for the cover of a publication claiming to be "news?" Watch the video and let me know what you think in the comments below!

Ryan Cooper's picture

Ryan is an mildly maniacal portrait/cosplay photographer from glorious Vancouver, Canada.

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23 Comments

Great job hastening the irrelevance of NEWSWEEK !

.

Agree, and Trump may be many things but Lazy is not one of them. Someone was too lazy to campaign in Wisconsin but it wasn't Trump.

You are soooo right! This would NEVER be done to ANY other president, like say Obama and wife as Terrorists, or A very Phalic Bill Clinton (who was you know....with his you know...) and War Monger Bush.....

NO, NO, No president has EVER had to put up with

Criticism (see TRUMP himself and the BIRTHER MOVT.)
OR THE PRESS (see Obama and Fox News for the last years ....or should i say NINE!)
Or Satire (see Will Ferrell as W. Or Dana Carvey as Bush 1 or Hammond as Clinton or Akroyd as Nixon)
Or Documentaries made negatively about them (See Fahrenheit 9/11 OR The Obama Deception)
OR TOTAL LACK OF RESPECT: See once again TRUMP QUESTIONING OBAMAS CITIZENSHIP! which is also obviously RACIST.

...once again Trump is the FIRST AT EVERYTHING!

but lets get this back to Photography.....I think based on Trump's CONSTANT tweeting and references to cable news both good and bad....this picture is probably VERY accurate. He spends a TREMENDOUS amount of time watching cable news according to...HIM.

I have no evidence that this man is NOT LAZY.....he installed a button for someone to bring him a pepsi into the Oval Office! He has never worked a day in his life, he inherited ALL of his wealth (that he didn't squander in failed business's like selling steaks at SHARPER IMAGE) and to boot no photographer can even get his skin tone correct because its not on the skin tone line! That is my biggest gripe with this photo....he skins looks to normal! That was the dead giveaway it was a composite!

Just go look at Jared Poulins breakdown of Trumps official Presidential Portrait and how COOL the image is....then watch as he tries to correct it...OOMPA LOOMPA!

Why are you including Platon's portrait of Bill Clinton in this? How is a photo that Clinton intentionally sat for disrespectful?

Agree. They wouldn't dare have done this to Obama. If you can't respect the man, at least respect the Office.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it ~ Hitler

I have always thought satire is the comedy of cynics. I really the like the composite of our President. I would think with all the “haters” of President Trunk, it’s simple to jump on the “band wagon:” to mock the office of the presidency’s. Harvard University issues a report of major news outlets. The review had like 92% of the President coverage was negative in word and style. So, it seems that “dog has been beaten” to many times, so to speak and is somewhat tiresome and overdone. I remember , I think it was Vanitiy Fair when the rag did a drawing un flatteringly editorial of President Obama’s face. It was sort of cartoonish look. I like satire and I like and support President Trump. I think the editorial is very funny. The President has been lampooned so many times since He was elected, sort of borning now.

Hey Ryan, can you stop posting troll fodder like this? I realize that stepping into the current political morass is a good way to drive engagement and clickthroughs but at what cost? I'm inundated with this crap all day, every day from a million other news sources. I come here to escape it all and simply read about photography.

If you want to keep pushing people's buttons (whether Trump supporters or detractors) in exchange for a few more nickels, then I'll vote with my eyeballs and spend my (limited) amount of time on PetaPixel, DPReview, Photofocus, Reddit or a thousand other options instead.

In what way is this troll fodder? This is a detailed analysis of a commercial project by a highly successful commercial photographer that also happens to bring up a very real moral dilemma that photographers encounter.

Yes, the subject is Donald Trump, but really, "who" it is, is irrelevant. Its the nature of the project that begs the discussion and its a very relevant one for the photographic community.

Just shows how much the "news" is biased nowadays... Modified images shouldn't be allowed for news IMHO.
One you start accepting that "news" photos can be fake, you might as well accept that everything in the article is biased and "fake" and Google/facebook should ban it from their search engines automatically. But they won't because they're biased as well 😛

The overt bias of the MSM and hypocrisy of liberals in general is why he'll win again in 2020.

viral photo ? first time I've seen this and i think i am pretty well informed and in the know. i'm not even a big President Trump fan i think this is kinda dumb. i doubt he has one of Killary or the other guy.

The left at his best as usual. Butt in he next election the silent majority will crash you again keep it up.
I love photography stop bashing our president, If you really love facts is that the last one that was in office was the most corrupted but again not a bleep from our news media I wonder why Democracy? or pure left totalitarian way thinking?

Love it! There's long tradition of presidential parodies and this is the best I've seen. So perfect.

Balance reporting from across the pond.....Spitting Image and the Royal Family. https://youtu.be/zBzBTbfByJU

HA! And I bet you think Fox News is truly fair and balanced.

Americans are so uptight about this stuff. Politicians are meant to be skewered and roasted! Don't, as I've heard it said, get your panties in a bunch. If you don't like this, you probably shouldn't check out what the rest of the world is saying about him.

To be honest, I thought that Newsweek's circulation numbers were so bad that they weren't producing physical issues anymore. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19989346

Visually, I'm not a fan of composits but this is a good looking illustration. Politically, the fact that a handful of people still support Mr. Trump after 11 months of his behavior is a real head scratcher.

No, he didn't. He got destroyed in the popular vote.

Number of states is pretty meaningless too, what is important is votes in the electoral college, which Trump won 306 to 232. Its really the only meaningful metric because it represents the actual race that the candidates engaged in. And, yes, that number supports William's position that he did, indeed, win by a landslide.

In truth, popular vote, would, in theory, be probably a fairer method as it gives each voter an equal voice but its a relatively meaningless metric when candidates are not campaigning for popular vote. This is why something like 90% of both campaign funds went into a small handful of swing states. Had the election been based on popular vote from the start both candidates would have had very different campaign strategies. Would the results have been different? Hard to say. Its important to remember that in areas where one party dominates there are likely many voters who didn't even bother voting because they knew what the local results would be anyway. In a popular vote race those people would likely vote, which means the "popular vote" of the election as it was is not representative of the popular will of the people.

Also for the record, Clinton didn't destroy Trump in the popular vote. She was ahead by 2.1%. That would amount to a small, victory in a popular vote system. A landslide is more like the electoral college results above that shows a 25% gap.

Note: This comment isn't meant to show support for either Clinton or Trump, rather, just to point out the facts.

If anybody still thinks that Newsweek is on the up-and-up - in a new piece they interviewed admitted child molester Dennis Hastert on the record about what’s wrong with “Trump’s Congress.” Yep, the got commentary from a guy who raped and abused boys. http://www.newsweek.com/congress-gingrich-hastert-681653?utm_campaign=Ne...