Elizabeth Holmes photographer reacts to“ You Can See Everything” after taking famous photo

Raechal ShewfeltFri, October 30, 2026 at 6:39 PM UTC

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Elizabeth Holmes in July 2014Credit: Karl Mondon/MediaNews Group/Bay Area News via GettyKey Points -

Photographer Ethan Pines, who took the iconic photo of Elizabeth Holmes holding a vial, has reacted to her comments about it.

Holmes said in You Can See Everything that she disliked the photo.

Pines said Holmes spent just less than two hours with him for the 2014 shoot.

The photographer who snapped that famous shot of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes holding up a (fake) vial of blood — a photo that ran on the cover of Forbes in 2014 —has seen You Can See Everything too.

The hit movie, in which Nathan Fielder and a camera crew moved in with Holmes ahead of her prison sentence, depicts Holmes as a critic of the infamous image, which has come to be the photo most associated with her.

Holmes claimed she didn’t like to be in the spotlight, as she was for the magazine’s feature on the 400 richest Americans, following her company’s insistence that it could accurately test single drops of blood for a litany of health conditions.

Photographer Ethan Pines believes that her negative feelings about the photo have little to do with it and a lot with “everything that has transpired since we shot it,” he told Today.com on Friday.

“I’ve thought about this, and I imagine if the device had worked, and Theranos was a successful, innovative Silicon Valley company, and she was the CEO of this successful company, I feel like that photo would not carry any negative connotations with it,” Pines said. “It would represent her as a pioneer and a boss.”

In January 2022, Holmes was convicted of having defrauded investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. She was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison, and she’s always maintained her innocence, as she does in the film.

Pines recalled that the shoot that happened before any of this took “a couple of hours” and took 220 frames overall, including 52 with the vial. She did her own hair and makeup.

“I knew she had a blood testing device,” Pines said. “I didn’t know much about it, but I was hoping there would be something ... that would represent the company or their technology.”

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Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes in ‘You Can See Everything’Credit: A24/YouTube

They used a vial with not blood but a dark liquid to stand in for it.

“Did I impose that on her or force her to do that? No,” Pines said. “[Her team] brought some of those out and we used one of them. So they were on board with it.”

At the time, he noted that he’d wanted to portray Holmes as a hero. She was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, and he thought he was getting the “true” her.

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But he said that now he’s not sure what to believe.

“I don’t know what the true Elizabeth Holmes is like,” Pines said. “And I think you walk away from this documentary wondering that also.”

You Can See Everything is in theaters now.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”