In 2015, a Theranos photo shoot left photographer Benjamin Rasmussen with questions about Elizabeth Holmes and the carefully controlled world the company wanted the cameras to show

Long before Elizabeth Holmes was associated with the Theranos affair, Benjamin Rasmussen needed about 20 minutes to take photographs of her for a magazine cover shoot.

Benjamin Rasmussen went to Theranos headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in 2015 as part of an assignment from Bloomberg Businessweek. This assignment was in response to an investigation conducted by The Wall Street Journal regarding the company’s blood testing device and growing pressures on Holmes.

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Back then, Holmes was still regarded as a Silicon Valley superstar, being typically photographed in her signature black turtleneck, with an intense look and perfect lighting. Rasmussen thought he would be able to take a straightforward portrait. In reality, he encountered a company that sought to control the image of its founder.

According to CNN, Rasmussen and his assistant, Ryan Brown, were expected to shoot Holmes against a white background.

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On arriving there, however, they were led to a lab and were told that Holmes should not be photographed alone, but only among groups of female scientists.

Years later, Rasmussen would look back at that afternoon and wonder whether he had witnessed an ordinary corporate publicity exercise or something much more carefully constructed.

The image Theranos wanted to show

Holmes' appearance was closely tied to the Theranos brand. The black turtleneck, confident expression and minimalist style had become part of the image of a young founder promising to transform healthcare.

But the Bloomberg Businessweek shoot was supposed to present something different.

According to CNN's account, Theranos' public-relations team pushed for group portraits rather than solo photographs. The scientists selected for the shoot were women, creating an image of Holmes as part of a larger scientific operation rather than the sole face of the company.

For Rasmussen, the level of control was noticeable. He had photographed CEOs and other public figures before, but the atmosphere at Theranos felt unusually managed.

The setting also caught his attention.

Holmes wore a white laboratory coat over her familiar black turtleneck, an outfit that appeared to reinforce the company's scientific credentials. Yet the room itself did not match Rasmussen's expectations of a tightly controlled medical facility. He remembered long tables, equipment and stacks of cardboard boxes.

The result was a curious contrast: a carefully constructed image of scientific authority inside a space that did not immediately look the way the photographer expected a medical laboratory to look.

Inside a lab that raised questions

Rasmussen's memories of the laboratory became more striking when compared with another assignment he had photographed in a hospital.

CNN reported that, during that earlier shoot, he had encountered sterile rooms, equipment checks and strict procedures, including double-gloving. Theranos was different. Rasmussen recalled being told only to wash his hands because there was "nasty stuff" in the room.

He had no way of knowing what those details would eventually mean.

At the time, Rasmussen was not investigating Theranos. He was there to take photographs. The company had not yet collapsed, and Holmes had not been charged with fraud.

There was even a strange postscript to the trip. Rasmussen's assistant became violently sick in the car on the way to the airport. They never established whether it was caused by the sushi burritos they had eaten or something else.

The more important memory was the disconnect between the picture Theranos wanted and what Rasmussen believed he was seeing.

The company wanted photographs suggesting scientific teamwork and credibility.

The photographer was struggling to reconcile that message with a laboratory that seemed less controlled than expected.

He also still needed to produce the cover portrait.

How Rasmussen got the portrait anyway

The photographers eventually decided to work around the restrictions.

Theranos had told them they could not use their planned white seamless backdrop and did not want Holmes photographed alone. Rasmussen and Brown instead began looking for another way to create the image they needed.

They noticed the window blinds could serve as a clean background.

While continuing to photograph the approved group shots, they gradually moved Holmes toward the windows. Brown used a reflector to conceal their movements, while Rasmussen continued directing the scientists even after they had moved out of the intended frame.

Eventually, they created enough space for several standalone photographs of Holmes.

One showed her in the white lab coat and black turtleneck with laboratory equipment and scientists behind her. It was much closer to the cover portrait Rasmussen had originally envisioned.

CNN reported that Theranos was not pleased with the resulting photographs.

For Rasmussen, though, the experience left a larger question.

He was accustomed to corporate teams trying to present their organizations in the best possible light. That was normal. What felt different at Theranos was the extent to which the company appeared to be managing not just the photographs, but the story those photographs were supposed to communicate.

The photographs took on a different meaning

Rasmussen initially treated the assignment as simply a strange, highly controlled photo shoot.

Then Theranos began to unravel.

Holmes was arrested and charged in 2018, and the company's claims about its blood-testing technology came under intense scrutiny. She was ultimately convicted of fraud in 2022. Only afterward did Rasmussen begin reconsidering what he had seen in Palo Alto years earlier.

CNN reported that Rasmussen began wondering how much of the Theranos presentation had been constructed for the cameras. But he is careful about the limits of his hindsight.

He did not know during the shoot that Theranos was fraudulent. He was not investigating the company and had no access to its internal decision-making. What he had was an impression that the environment was unusually controlled.

He also remembered Holmes differently from the confident founder portrayed in the media.

Rasmussen said she did not strike him as especially commanding. In some photographs, he saw what he described as a more uncertain expression, leading him to later say she appeared more like someone playing the role of Elizabeth Holmes than the powerful CEO the public had been shown. CNN noted that this was Rasmussen's retrospective interpretation, not evidence of what Holmes was thinking at the time.

Rasmussen also chose not to release his account immediately. He received offers to license the photographs but did not want them to become part of what he viewed as a wider process of publicly shaming Holmes.

His story resurfaced after filmmaker Nathan Fielder released a tense trailer for a documentary featuring Holmes. Rasmussen then publicly discussed what happened during the old Theranos shoot.

That has given the photographs a second life.

The images themselves have not changed. Their context has.

A photograph that once presented Holmes as a technology founder inside her laboratory is now viewed alongside everything that followed: the collapse of Theranos, the criminal case and Holmes' conviction.

Rasmussen does not claim that his camera uncovered the scandal. His experience was more limited, and perhaps more revealing for that reason.

He walked into Theranos expecting to take a portrait. Instead, he encountered a tightly managed environment, improvised around the restrictions and left with questions he could not answer at the time.

CNN's account makes clear that the most significant part of the story is not whether the photographs somehow predicted Theranos' downfall. They did not. It is the gap between the image a company wanted to present and what an outsider experienced while trying to capture it.

More than a decade later, that gap is what makes the photographs so compelling.