For a man accused of espionage and effectively exiled in Russia, Edward Snowden is also, strangely, free, thanks in part to a robot that lets him maintain a busy schedule in the U.S. Contributing editor Andrew Rice got to know Snowden via the robot over the past few months, following it to public and private events, including a guided tour of the Whitney. “Regardless of the fact that the FBI has a field office in New York, I can be hanging out in New York museums,” Snowden tells Rice New York’s latest cover story. Rice notes: “After a while, you stop noticing that he is a robot, just as you have learned to forget that the disembodied voice at your ear is a phone.”
“To accompany Andrew’s profile we wanted to make a riveting portrait of Snowden,” says photography director Jody Quon. “But obviously the portrait would entail photographing him through this robot-like apparatus.” Quon says she enlisted photographer Platon because he’d already spent time with Snowden and there was an established level of comfort between the two that she felt would allow him to get past the head shot. “Even through the robot he was able to get a human spirit.”
