In Rough Country (19 page)

Annie Leibovitz
A Photographer's Life
1990–2005

O
urs is an age of memoir—inevitably, faux-memoir: the highly selective and enhanced employment of “historic” individuals, events, and settings in the creation of a text; or, in the case of Annie Leibovitz's massive
A Photographer's Life 1990–2005
, a text with photographs arranged to suggest an elegiac narrative of loss, rebirth, and spiritual transcendence. After the death in December 2004—as depicted here in harrowing, painfully graphic images some observers may find offensive, not an easy death—of her longtime companion Susan Sontag, Leibovitz set herself the task of compiling photographs for a memorial book which gradually evolved into a larger memoir of the previous fifteen years of the photographer's life: “Going through my pictures to put this book together was like being on an archaelogical dig,” Leibovitz says in her introduction. Initially, the memoir was going to include only personal
photographs, encompassing the lingering illnesses and deaths of Sontag and of Samuel Leibovitz, the photographer's father who died in January 2005, but the project grew in size, scope, and ambition, to include highly stylized commercial work originally commissioned by such glossy publications as
Condé Nast Traveler
,
Vogue
, and
Vanity Fair
. As if to defend herself against the charge of exploiting her commercial work, with its notable emphasis upon such media celebrities as Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, to draw attention to the more modest personal material, Leibovitz has said: “I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”

In the Brooklyn Museum exhibit of 197 photographs, most but not all included in the book, the glitzy, theatrically staged celebrity portraits are showcased while the smaller, black-and-white personal photographs, many of Leibovitz's extended family, are marginalized; the Brooklyn Museum poster for the exhibit is a reproduction of Leibovitz's
Vanity Fair
photograph of Nicole Kidman as a Hollywood fantasy concoction, while the cover of the book consists of shadowy, somber, resolutely unglamorous photographs of Annie Leibovitz in repose, taken by Susan Sontag, and a sequence of mist-shrouded, unidentified landscapes. Where the Brooklyn Museum exhibit is high-decibel, self-aggrandizing, and frequently meretricious, the book is subdued, meditative, and intimate; where the museum exhibit is aggressively glamorous, the book yields small, subtle moments of humanity, particularly in close-ups of the photographer's parents who emerge as distinct and admirable
personalities. Though none of Leibovitz's intensely personal photographs of individuals from her private life, including her three very young daughters Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle, rises to the level of the intimate memoirist art of Leibovitz's contemporaries Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin (whose
Ballad of Sexual Dependency
would seem to have been a strong influence), nor to the level of Leibovitz's friend and mentor Richard Avedon (whose photographs of his dying father have become classics of twentieth-century photography), yet these are poignant and touching, as they are resolutely unpretentious, “pictures” of ordinary life.

 

The photographic image would seem to be the most chameleon-like of all images, deriving meaning almost entirely from the context in which it appears, from its size vis-à-vis the viewer, and from its position in space: on the museum or gallery wall, or in a book. The glamorous celebrity photographs for which Annie Leibovitz is best known, that appeared originally in or on the cover of
Vanity Fair
, appear, on the museum wall, in a vast white space usually designated for “art,” ludicrously overblown and synthetic, glossy and flat as movie posters; yet, in the book, surrounded by Leibovitz's low-keyed, candid, “artless” personal material, the identical images, greatly reduced in size, function as the memoirist intends them: as specimens of her professional work, bulletins from a distant country. The much-hyped celebrity photographs of Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt, Sylvester Stallone (in the nude, muscled and headless) are most successful as magazine photography, scaled to the page, or on the cover, where amid mundane or trashy
newsstand rivals, Leibovitz's meticulously staged portraits glow like gems; in the museum exhibit, exposed on the museum wall, the famous cover of the very pregnant Demi Moore seems but a parody of Hollywood self-exhibitionism on the part of an actress of unexceptional talent in collusion with the buzz-oriented magazine (at that time edited by Tina Brown) and a high-tech photographer who routinely employs a crew of assistants and much equipment for one of her colossally expensive “shoots.”

Enormous brooding photographs of such celebrities as Mick Jagger (posed topless, on an unmade bed, with cinched-in waist and darkened lips), Brad Pitt (posed sprawled atop a rumpled bed in a Vegas hotel, in a gaudy striped shirt and what appear to be faux-ocelot-skin pants and cowboy boots), and baby-faced dreamboat Leonardo DiCaprio (posed with a swan cradled in his arms and the swan's neck looped about his own neck: live swan? stuffed swan?) exude an air of comical inflation on the museum wall, while in the book, reduced to something like human scale, they might be read as individuals who have succumbed to garish fantasies about themselves. Some of the celebrity photographs verge upon kitsch-caricature, like the portrait of a fatuous-looking Jack Nicholson gripping a golf club, in a wind-ruffled bathrobe and dark glasses, reacting as if he's surprised by the camera; and the reclining B-movie pose of the young actress Scarlett Johansson in a garish Hollywood glamor costume and abbreviated satin panties. The celebrity photographs are usually portraits in isolation, as if the condition of celebrity-hood is self-enclosed, autistic; where two celebrities are photographed together, a dark-garbed Johnny
Depp slung upon the naked body of the “super-model” Kate Moss on an unmade bed in the Royalton Hotel, the effect is of two exhibitionists who have found each other, in a display of sexual intimacy for the benefit of the photographer looming over them. The effect of a sequence of such photographs is numbing, if not exasperating: for all her skill, the photographer has made no attempt to “reveal” character but merely to expose or exploit fantasies. In an interview in
7 Days
, Leibovitz acknowledges being barely able to look at her commercial work, which was on display in her studio in preparation for
A Photographer's Life
: while insisting that she is still proud of the work, Leibovitz expresses the wish that “it had more meaning, more substance.”

It is a curious fact: the more you ponder Annie Leibovitz's high-tech commercial work, the less you see in it; viewer, celebrity, and photographer come to seem crushed together, suffocated in non-meaning.

On the museum wall, these photographs predominate; in the book, they are bracketed by far more interesting personal material like pictures—to use Leibovitz's modest term—from the photographer's trip to Sarajevo in 1993 with Susan Sontag, where the women met with editors of the newspaper
Oslobodjenje
, and of the photographer's country place in rural Rhinebeck, New York. (In the book, as distinct from the museum exhibit, upstate New York with its densely wooded hills, mist-shrouded ponds and vistas romantically empty of human figures, functions as a much-needed contrast to the claustrophobia of the studio.) Leibovitz includes several panoramic photographs of the ruins of 9/11 followed immediately,
and unabashedly, by a photograph of an enormously pregnant fifty-one-year-old Leibovitz (taken by Susan Sontag) and delivery room photographs of the birth of Leibovitz's daughter Sarah in October 2001. The symbolic meaning is blunt and yet appropriate: thousands of people have died in the World Trade Center terrorist attack, there is death in the world, but Annie Leibovitz's first daughter has been born, and the lineage that includes Leibovitz's admirable parents Marilyn and Samuel will continue. Harshly criticized by the
New York Times
art critic Roberta Smith for both the “pedestrian” nature of her personal photographs and for her exhibitionism, Leibovitz would seem to have little choice about including in her memoir such intimate material in which the “public” and the “private” intersect. How dark, how suffocating in its images of debilitating disease and death
A Photographer's Life
would have been, without the irresistible “baby pictures” of Leibovitz's three daughters! Recall Henry David Thoreau, a Transcendentalist predecessor: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

 

Unguarded, unposed and painfully intimate photographs of a desperately ill Susan Sontag in hospital beds in New York City and in Seattle, in the last days of her life unrecognizable, face ravaged and stomach grotesquely bloated, appear, on the museum wall, too close by the glamour celebrity photographs of “perfect” bodies not to be cruelly diminished by them. In the public space that is the museum wall, viewed by a neutral observer who knew nothing of the photographer's longtime rela
tionship to Sontag, such raw work reads like an exploitation of the subject's helplessness that would constitute an outrageous violation of Sontag's privacy if snapped by paparazzi who'd breached hospital security to get to her room: the viewer recoils in dismay, revulsion. Yet, in the book, where many pages of memoirist material involving Sontag and Leibovitz and their years of traveling together have prepared the viewer for such intimacy, these photographs of an aging woman in physical distress, like those of the deceased Sontag on a bier in a Fortuny-like dress, take on another, far more nuanced and poignant significance:

The photographs of Leibovitz's that work most successfully in the museum exhibit are those of bodies in motion: an astonishing leap by the (unclothed) dancer Bill T. Jones, another leap by the silhouetted Michael Jordan, close-ups of the beautifully sculpted bodies of members of the U.S. Olympics athletic teams including swimmers, gymnasts, runners and pole-vaulters, whose heroic exploits seem to transcend merely personal identity, as in the sculpted human forms of antiquity. While a close-up of the elderly Eudora Welty showing
the writer vacant-eyed and seemingly without affect is a cruel exposure of Welty in an unguarded moment, close-ups of the elderly, seemingly moribund William Burroughs exude an air of something like primal terror, and human resignation in the face of such terror, as if the prankster Burroughs were peering at the viewer through the eye holes of his own death mask. There is a witty juxtaposition of President George W. Bush and his advisers followed immediately by a feisty-looking Michael Moore and his assistants, who would mercilessly lampoon Bush and his crew in the satirical film
Fahrenheit 9/11
; and there are close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Brodsky, Richard Avedon, Colin Powell, Daniel Day-Lewis, and a craggy, bewhiskered Willie Nelson that gain from the exalted-heroic treatment. The museum exhibit ostentatiously concludes with a separate room containing eight gigantic landscapes that loom above the viewer with the portentousness of greeting card pictures monstrously inflated; yet, in the book, accompanying the starkly intimate photographs of the last days of Susan Sontag and of the elderly Sam Leibovitz, these identical images, in particular an Ansel Adams–inspired photograph of birch trees taken in Ellenville, New York, are beautifully understated and “Transcendental.”

As a book,
A Photographer's Life 1990–2005
has the heft and intransigence of a grave marker. As befits a dream sequence, its pages are unnumbered; maddeningly, there is no table of contents, no index. Should you wish to locate certain of Leibovitz's photographs, you must page through the book, turn these enormous pages repeatedly. Still, where the museum exhibit offers, as its glitzy poster proclaims, a sensational ex
perience, or, more precisely, to employ Samuel Johnson's remark about the Metaphysical poets, an experience of violently yoked-together images, few of them very deep or abiding, the book offers a protracted and unmistakable emotional experience. The moral of the exhibit is implicit in its staging: celebrity trumps family, public trumps private, glamour trumps the quotidian. But the book tells a very different story by rearranging images and bringing them into the same approximate scale, of the eclipsing of the /files/11/23/64/f112364/public/professional life by the artist's private life: the arduous but spiritually restorative act of memorialization. In this version, the “offensive” photographs of loved ones
in extremis
are necessary components of one's own suffering; the dying individual is a part of oneself, reluctantly surrendered to death. Where an unsympathetic observer might recoil from what appears to be the ghoulish avidity with which the photographer takes “pictures” of her dying, and dead, loved ones, now corpses from which life has vanished, the sympathetic observer might interpret the act as homage, akin to a descent into death: the primitive, instinctual, visceral initial refusal to acknowledge the finality of death. The unsympathetic observer resents being forced into the position of voyeur; the sympathetic observer is willing to be forced into the position of a fellow voyager.

Granted that the memoirist impulse is fundamentally narcissistic and that the memoirist is obliged to make much of human experiences—losses of loved ones, births of babies, happy family reunions, sorrowful graveyard scenes—that are common to us all, yet the effect, in the hands of some practitioners, is an art that can speak to others. Though a project's range may
be narrow, yet its roots can go deep. In
On Photography
, Susan Sontag remarks: “As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality.” But “sentimentality” may be the risk that the more reckless and more aggrieved among us must take in the pursuit of the elusive memoirist vision.