The media, including bloggers like me, was invited to the Annie Leibovitz show at the Brooklyn Museum Thursday morning. When I got there, a woman handed me a press packet and said excitedly, "Annie is walking the reporters around the show."
Surrounded by dozens of hungry reporters and camera people, there she was, this tall, unglamorous, real looking person — the person behind all those Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone covers and spreads — talking graciously about her life as a photographer.
Her mentor, Robert Frank, taught her that "You can’t get every pictrure," back when she was shooting for Rolling Stone. She said she was dumbfounded and then relieved. "I was only as good as my last picture back then."
She never thought of herself as a rock and roll photographer, who lived for the music. "It was always about the photographs," she said. But all those Rolling Stone covers taught her about portraiture. Later at Vanity Fair, she got tired of showing up at shoots and having to figure out what to do with the subject on the spot. "That’s when the work got conceptual," she said.
The portraits she did for Vanity Fair, whether it’s Scarlet Johansson looking like an underaged hooker, Karen Finley showing off her curvacous backside, Julian Schnabel in his ubiquitous pajamas, with paint on his shoes, or a nude and pregnant Demi Moore exuding a powerfully maternal vibe, come across as as a knowing collaboration between two people — celebrity and photographer.
Make no mistake, these are two experts engaged in the art of image making.
It would be true to say that Leibovitz is an instrument in the star making machinary of our celebrity culture. The show is, at once, a celebration and a critique of it. One of the last portrait images in the show is a grotesque shot of Melania Trump posing naked and pregnant in a gold bikini on the steps of a private jet (in all of its phallic grandeur), with Donald Trump practically hidden nearby in a sports car.
An obvious perversion (or progression) of the photographic gesture that began with the nude shot of a pregnant Demi Moore with a big diamond ring, the Trump shot is a crass display of money, power, and the trophy values of our commercial culture (including the cache of having one’s picture taken by Leibovitz).
The show ends with a display of enormous black and white landscapes, Walking in, I said to myself, the critics are really going to nail her for these because they set off pretension alarms. And yet, they are like Leibovitz’s other work about power and fame. In this case, portraits of monuments of nature that have the same recongizablity and star power as the human celebs, Leibovitz compared them to the group shots she became famous for at Vanity Fair. "I don’t like groups, they’re anti-photography, really. But in this context they’re like a time-line of where I’ve been."
The show includes a large number of personal snapshots of her family and her life partner, Susan Sontag. These seemingly off-hand snapshots of Susan and Annie on vacation, in cancer wards, in hotel rooms, with Annie’s children are displayed right next to the big, commercial work. But they are also shown as small prints and tear sheets on pin up boards.
The family shots are, ultimately, about the decay of the body. Her mother’s flabby, unapologetic figure in a bathing suit, her father on his deathbed, Susan Sontag in a unflattering hospital gown, Annie posed a la Demi Moore big and pregnant, Susan Sontag layed out after her death in funeral home wearing a Fortuny dress looking like Gertrude Stein. There is, of course, beauty in these shots, but beauty of a different order: it is unadorned and real.
Ultimately, there is a continum between these two strands of Leibovitz’s work. “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it," she writes. Whether she is trying to make the most out of high-end, overproduced encounter with a celebrity or snapping gently in the homes of her family and friends, Annie Lebovitz’s work is much more personal than anyone ever expected.
That’s because her life as a celebrity photogarpher and her personal life are one and the same. "I had no life when I was younger. I was so wrapped up in the shoots," she told the reporters. Ultimately she created an unorthodox family in her late forties, which became her inadvertant muse. At the time, Susan Sontag told her that she’s the only photographer she knows who doesn’t take pictures all the time. I guess Leibovitz took her advice.
It must have been great to have one of the world’s foremost theorists on photography around for constant comment and critique.
By taking on a real life, Leibovitz takes on the big stuff: birth, illness, death, more death. Leibovitz lost her lover, Susan Sontag and her father within weeks of each other. Real life, it turns out, is about as unglamorous as you can get (even if they did travel to incredible places).
The personal pictures, shown in serial form, are not as bold and beautiful as her famous work. But they do pull you in – partially because they satisfy certain voyeuristic tendencies (mine) I got to see the screen of Susan Sontag’s Apple computer and what her handwritten notes look like. I saw what famous people look like when they are on vacation, with their families, in hospital beds.
We are all so ordinary and the same in hospitals.
Susan Sontage in a tiny NYC-style bathtub covering her mastectomy scar is breathtaking in its ordinary power. It also reminded me of the many famous pictures Leibovitz has done of celebrities like Whoopie Goldberg and Bette Midler in the bathtub.
"You only get one shot for a magazine cover," she told reporters. But real life is abut multiples, about what happens before and after "the picture."
And for these photograph, she didn’t have to bring any props to the shoot.
They were pictures just waiting to be told.
