Benjamin Rasmussen says his 2015 Theranos photo shoot with Elizabeth Holmes was tightly managed by the PR team and later looked, to him, like a charade. He said the assignment for Businessweek changed after allegations began surfacing about the company’s blood-testing claims, and the final image came only after a work-around inside the lab.
Rasmussen and Ryan Brown
Rasmussen said he met Holmes as Theranos faced questions about claims that it could revolutionize blood testing using only a tiny sample. He wrote that Holmes had been presented as a Steve Jobs figure, with a black turtleneck and a piercing gaze, before the shoot shifted toward a group portrait of women scientists.
The photographer said the Theranos PR team allowed only group portraits of women scientists in lab coats. In his words, that meant a hard pivot to show the company as a team effort rather than a single-founder story.
White Window Shade
Rasmussen said he and his assistant Ryan Brown had a crisis meeting at the lab, then decided to get the shot they came for anyway. He said they used a white window shade as a backdrop, photographed friendly, corporate-looking scenes, and slowly moved Holmes closer to the window.
He said Brown held up a huge reflector behind him to block the PR team’s view, while Rasmussen gave super-specific direction to scientists who were not even vaguely in frame. The final frame, he said, was a head-and-shoulders shot of Holmes looking straight down the camera against a white backdrop.
Theranos PR
Rasmussen later told, “It was this really hard pivot to (show) this was a team effort.” He also said, “When we walked into this space, we realized how much they were trying to control it,” and added, “You don’t kind of expect that the whole thing is a facade. In hindsight, it’s been like, wait a second, was this all a charade?”
He said the Theranos PR team would not have known the full extent of the crisis the company was facing during the shoot, but he eventually received feedback from Theranos and said it “was not good.”
The account surfaces as Rasmussen revisited the story after seeing the trailer for Nathan Fielder documentary You Can See Everything. For readers, the takeaway is narrow but specific: the image that helped sell Theranos public-facing polish was built under tight control, and Rasmussen’s own description now points to how much effort went into shaping what the camera could see.
Elizabeth Holmes
Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in 2022 and now resides at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas. Rasmussen’s account does not change that record, but it adds a first-person view of how Theranos managed its image before the conviction and why the photo now reads differently to the person who took it.
