| In one of her many meditations on the taking of pictures, Susan Sontag wrote that “all photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable — that is, unforgettable.” Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s lover before her death in 2004, says she doesn’t really “have a single favorite photograph” among those she’s taken; it’s her body of work, its “accumulation,” that gives her the most satisfaction. And yet “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” the latest of her books, makes a viewer realize how many of Leibovitz’s pictures have managed, individually, to fulfill the egoistic aspiration Sontag ascribed to all photographs. (The New York Times, December 12, 2008.) |
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Thomas Mallon
Courtesy of The New York Times.
In one of her many meditations on the taking of pictures, Susan Sontag
wrote that “all photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable
— that is, unforgettable.” Annie Leibovitz,
Sontag’s lover before her death in 2004, says she doesn’t really “have
a single favorite photograph” among those she’s taken; it’s her body of
work, its “accumulation,” that gives her the most satisfaction. And yet
“Annie Leibovitz at Work,” the latest of her books, makes a viewer
realize how many of Leibovitz’s pictures have managed, individually, to
fulfill the egoistic aspiration Sontag ascribed to all photographs.Modestly proportioned, this new book is trim-sized more for the
nightstand than the coffee table. Its photos are generally reproduced
on a smaller scale than they were during their first appearances in
splashy venues like Vanity Fair. The text, part memoir, part casual
manifesto, is conveyed in an unpretentious, sometimes even choppy,
style — “Athletes are proud of their bodies. They’ve worked very hard
on them” — that derives from its being “based on conversations” between
Leibovitz and her editor, Sharon DeLano.If the more general
observations about photography in “At Work” don’t surprise, they do
convince. They’re delivered by induction, set against the particular
photos that taught Leibovitz her lessons. Among them: the camera really
does love some people more than others; not just leggy Nicole Kidman
but “gaunt, sinister” William Burroughs. When doing sports photography,
“if you see the picture through the viewfinder, you’re too late.” (She
got the hurdle, but not Edwin Moses.)Leibovitz is “not
nostalgic about cameras” or even film, but “At Work” does display a
kind of wistfulness for much of what she got to see over the last 40
years, and even for some of what she just missed, like the Paris
fashion shows of the 1960s, where “photographers and editors stayed up
working around the clock and everyone got drunk and crazy and wild.”
(Leibovitz did, it should be noted, get to go on tour with the Rolling Stones.) The author clings to a belief, reinforced by shooting the O. J. Simpson
trial and its raucous surroundings, that still photographs, which
invite contemplation, can even now compete with “the barrage of images
on television.” (Being nearly as famous as some of her subjects hasn’t
hurt Leibovitz: Judge Lance Ito, a fan, gave her special access to his
courtroom.)What Leibovitz learned from her early magazine
work, much of it for Rolling Stone, derived from on-the-job experience,
not editorial direction. Shooting concerts was difficult because “you
were at the mercy of the lighting people, who were usually on drugs.”
The subjects could be too. After she told a writer she’d seen “vats of
white powder” around Ike Turner when photographing him — and the
information found its way into print — Turner called her: “Annie, this
is Ike. How could you have done that? We have ways to take care of
people like you.” Lesson learned? “I decided that from then on the
writer’s story was his story and my story was my story.” Often her
story needed no text at all: a 1975 photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger,
naked in a hotel room after winning a body-building competition, makes
him look as if he’s been turned to stone, a sort of muscle-bound Midas
tricked by fate.Leibovitz avoids inflated claims for what she
does and deflects compliments that her pictures have “captured someone”
with a confirmed belief that a photograph can never get more than “a
tiny slice of a subject.” Her famous shot of an extremely pregnant Demi Moore
may have been a great magazine cover, but Leibovitz says it’s too
awkward and constrained (the subject had to cover her breasts) to be “a
good photograph per se.” Her self-criticisms are neither left-handed
nor tormenting; she sees what’s wrong and, freshly instructed, moves
on. Criticism of subjects is nowhere to be found: “There certainly are
people who are a pain to work with. I’d be crazy to name them. You
can’t be indiscreet in this business.”George Lois, the art director whose high-concept 1960s Esquire covers put Sonny Liston in a Santa hat and Andy Warhol
in a can of soup, has had a longer influence on Leibovitz than he did
on magazines in general. (Leibovitz deplores current cover designs for
being safe and formulaic.) The conceptual covers she did for Rolling
Stone — the Blues Brothers painted blue; Meryl Streep
pulling at her own whitefaced visage — prefigured a technique (“placing
my subject in the middle of an idea”) that carried over into the
pictures she made for a long-running advertising campaign by American
Express. Some of her best work illustrated the corporate claim that
“Membership has its privileges”: Willie Shoemaker standing next to Wilt Chamberlain; John Cleese hanging from a tree; Ella Fitzgerald
in a pose and outfit that for once allowed her to convey sexiness
instead of perfect pitch. For these shoots, as always, Leibovitz did
her “homework,” boning up on her subjects but then, in their presence,
not making any special effort to put them at their ease. She has even
resorted to a variant of Lieutenant Columbo’s just-one-more-thing
approach to get what she wants: “As soon as you say it’s over, the
subject will feel relieved and suddenly look great. And then you keep
shooting.”Contrary to some press accounts, Queen Elizabeth did not storm out of her session with Leibovitz; she more or less stormed in,
brisk and impatient. One of the resulting photographs, with Her Majesty
in a huge cape against a wintry landscape, looks rather like the
ultimate American Express ad. As it happens, the trees in the picture
were shot on a Tuesday. The Queen, disinclined to go outdoors, was shot
the next day, and the royal marriage of digital images was effected
after that.Leibovitz made the transition to computerized
imagery with some reluctance: digital photography seemed at first to
require too many people and too much equipment on the set. But she has
“learned to love” the new medium, which allows her to take fewer
pictures and see what she’s getting as she gets it. With digital,
photographers “can keep the image that used to exist only on the
Polaroid” taken during the setup.Digital can also cater to
celebrities’ schedules, allowing them to be shot separately for the
same group pictures. As Leibovitz explains: “The picture of Helen Mirren and Judi Dench
in the car” — part of a fictional, film-noir photo essay for Vanity
Fair — “was made in two different places.” But to the viewer, the
possibilities seem not so much endless as entropic; these complicated
photo fantasies crammed with stars and costumes and layouts move beyond
concept toward a kind of visual cacophony. The contrivance begins to
control Leibovitz instead of the other way around, as is the case in
her brilliant business as usual.“At Work” includes a picture
of the photographer’s mother, Marilyn Leibovitz, shot in 1997. These
days it “means more and more” to the daughter who took it, because of
its honesty: “My mother is looking at me as if the camera were not
there.” This is not a condition easily replicated when the photographer
isn’t the subject’s flesh and blood, and it doesn’t obtain almost
anywhere else in the book, which is fine, since Leibovitz’s work, apart
from a 1990s foray into Sarajevo, has never really been about honesty.
As “At Work” makes clear, it has been about performance and arrangement
— of the highest and shiniest order. (The New York Times, December 12, 2008.)
