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The Ruling Class

Platon’s Portraits of Power

World leaders sit down with photographer.

Is this the closest that President Obama, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hugo Chavez have come to sitting down in the same room? The New Yorker has published 44 portraits of world leaders taken by Platon during the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September. They include leaders great and small, ranging from the president of Kiribati to Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Asif Zardari of Pakistan. In addition to Ahmadinejad and Chavez, men like Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi also sat down. Platon descrbies Ahmadinejad as a “childlike figure … He giggles like a little boy.”

Read it at The New Yorker

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