Power Is Nothing Without Control (Carl Lewis)

Why it works

The fastest man in the world, crouched in the starting blocks, wearing red stiletto heels. Annie Leibovitz photographed the Olympic champion Carl Lewis in Texas in 1994 for Young & Rubicam's Pirelli campaign, and the headline did the rest: "Power is nothing without control." The image dramatises what a tyre is for without showing a tyre: all that speed is useless if you cannot put it safely on the road. The Washington Post reported it going up on billboards across Europe, with Pirelli explaining that even the best performer can be let down by the wrong equipment. It is studied as a model of the visual paradox, a picture that stops you because something is wrong and then resolves into the brand's argument, and of casting a celebrity against type rather than simply borrowing his fame. The line proved so durable that Pirelli still uses it three decades on, and the Pirelli Foundation calls the photograph an indelible image in the history of visual communication.