ANNIE LEIBOVITZ A PHOTOGRAPHER'S LIFE

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: A PHOTOGRAPHER’s LIFE 
1990 – 2005 

MCA SYDNEY until 27 March 2011

I hadn’t realized how much Avedon meant to me until he died … He rode both horses. It didn’t seem like he was a commercial photographer. He was an artist.

The Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art has chosen a big Annie Leibovitz show, already shown very successfully elsewhere, as its summer blockbuster.

This photographic diary of Leibovitz’s life in a fifteen-year period raises the question of her status as an artist in much the same way any retrospective would.

This exhibition though tends to obscure assessment – it is too haphazard: from Brad Pitt lolling about in ginger tones in a co-coordinated Las Vegas bedroom to a fallen BMX almost embraced by an arc of what Leibovitz’s note tells us is the blood of the victim of mortar attack in Sarajevo. Her note might be taken as paradigmatic of her approach to photography –

I was on the way to a housing project to photograph Miss Sarajevo. We put him in the car and sent him to the hospital, but he died on the way.

        

The image is in the same tone as the note: curiously cold, distancing. It is not even poignant. It is hardly even graphic. The blood trace swings like a calligraphic brush stroke to highlight the fallen bike. Formalism rules.

Leibovitz either eschews or cannot register intimacy (this is why her documentation of her lover Susan Sontag’s decline with cancer is neither moving nor appalling). Beauty especially evades her.

Working one’s way through the exhibition is in part a tour of the history of Twentieth Century American photography and in the portraits, of western painting. In her Lake Maratanza we have the Lake George Stieglitz (the diminutive size of the photograph echoes his). The Yosemite  Ansel Adams is taken into hellish realms in Leibovitz’s gargantuan Monument Valley photographs. Their huge scale and wanton blurriness seem an attempt at defying failure of venture. The whole exhibition, in its conflicting diversity, its haphazard expanse, has a feeling of commercial opportunism: the photographs were initially gathered for a Random House book.

I’m not a great studio portraitist. At best my studio photographs are graphic … I don’t feel like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me. On the other hand, when you strip everything away, it’s just terrifying.

Nevertheless …

Diane Arbus is present in some portrait studies of Leibovitz’s family members. Dorothea Lange and the intense character of the subject lend power and in this case beauty to a portrait of Leibovitz’s mother. Other subjects are depicted reclining à la Victorian portraiture (Leibovitz has a penchant for the reclining figure). So persistent is this sense of a tradition and influence, of Art History in Leibovitz’s work that it can hardly be inadvertent: homage is integral to her style. Mapplethorpe is frequently glimpsed, so are Horst and Platt Lynes who were certainly not averse to studio set-ups, nor was Richard Avedon with whose influence this article began.

Homage lends Leibovitz power and suggests her weaknesses – she gropes for authenticity, for vision. She is not a particularly imaginative, original artist.

As already suggested, every now and again in Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, the photographer transcends this sense of the coldly distanced, the derivative. The portrait of Cindy Sherman (with human simulations) is a remarkable tribute. This is, in its way, witty. While her work is not exactly playful – actually it is grim - a wry sense of … is it wonder and the ludicrous? shimmers over some of Leibovitz’s portraits: the metallic but pregnant Trumps surrounded by their mechanical Parnassus for example. We are inclined to take Mick Jagger as a grumpy satyr more seriously. Leonardo DiCaprio in emulation of Joan Seyferth’s portrait of Pavlova with her favourite swan, Peter is more difficult to come to admire – is it a triumph of formalism over any insight at all?

The trouble with stripping away everything in a studio portrait is that it leaves us always with a universal: every human being is basically terrified and furious. This is what we do get in the studio portrait of Richard Avedon (oh how Leibovitz carries on in her note about photographing him). She exposes him as a vain and foolish almost octogenarian, a frightened and furious poseur.

It is the commercial work (particularly for Vanity Fair) that shows Leibovitz at her best. Her famous portrait of the pregnant Demi Moore (Mapplethorpe is the influence as he is in the study of Bruce Willis’ and Moore’s hands clasped over Moore’s distended womb) helped change attitudes towards pregnancy. But the masterwork in the show is the study of theatrical glamour which has the figure of Nicole Kidman as a focus. Leibovitz is at her strongest in spectacular and elaborate studio/set pieces in which humans are models.

Her group portrait of the George Bush Jnr circle – Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice … just after they have made the decision to invade Iraq is the exception; its mise en scène is, for Leibovitz, severely restrained, allowing a piercing revelation of malice, power and buffoonery.

Ian MacNeill