Positive Focus / Discuss

colorstalker    says:

What Annie Leibovitz does best she does very well. Collected in the current show at the Brooklyn Museum, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005, her signature large-scale portraits of celebrity artists, musicians, actors & politicians are conceptually & technically brilliant, often psychologically riveting.

So why do so many of them piss me off?

Leibovitz is an heir to the great 19th- & early-20th-century portrait painters -- especially, I think, to fellow high-priced American, John Singer Sargent , whose meticulous depictions similarly flattered his sitters without sacrificing a certain clear-eyed realism. Like Sargent before her, Leibovitz has mastered the art of win-win artistic collaboration. Her portraits claim integrity by making their subjects uniquely human, yet they also confer pop mythological status. They can be astute, even searching, but there are few surprises in these photographic transactions. The magazines for which Leibovitz made the pictures -- Rolling Stone, Vogue and Vanity Fair – were & are widely understood to be pop culture’s visual publications of record. In the portraits both photographer and subjects had their eye on history. And both were eager to do what it takes to be remembered.

In 1884 the Parisian beauty Madame Gautreau had wanted to be remembered too. She allowed Sargent to paint more of her creamy white shoulders and bosom than was considered tasteful at the time. In the original painting Sargent painted one strap of her gown slipping down her shoulder. The resulting uproar was so ferocious he withdrew the painting and repainted the strap. Ostensibly to protect Mme. Gautreau, he also gave the painting a mysterioius new name before re-exhibiting it. A Portrait of Madame X is the most famous painting of Sargent’s long and distinguished career.

In our era we have Demi Moore. A second-rate actress with a pretty, if somewhat heavy-chinned, face, she arguably reached the zenith of her fame appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair in a 1991 photograph by Leibovitz. In the picture she’s calmly naked, hugely pregnant and glamorous – an impeccably styled & accessorized late 20th-century fertility goddess. (Hear her roar.)

With her portraits Leibovitz plays the celebrity game knowingly. She understands that today’s successful artist must not only produce work but also tirelessly market a personal mystique. In fact – judging by her own reputed $100,000-a-day fees and diva-like tantrums – Leibovitz is more than an observer of this scene; she’s herself an important player . As Sanjiv Bhattacharya noted in a recent Guardian piece on Leibovitz, “Her interest is not in the unguarded moment, but the staged moment; not the inner life, but the outer image.”

Sometimes there’s no real work behind the mystique. Leibovitz gives us the poseur as art -- the empty bombast of Julian Schnabel lounging on a settee in a paint-spattered smoking jacket; the manic idiocy of Jim Carey yawping at the camera; the grim acquisitiveness of Donald Trump with Ivana & other toys. Perhaps their vapidity is the real subject.

In other pictures Leibovitz’s strategy of ceding her frame without comment to her subjects elicits brilliance. Actors like Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino know exactly what to do. Sitting or standing against an austere grey backdrop, they project personas that will last as long as the photographs do.

Leibovitz also knows what to emphasize. She poses a younger, surprisingly tender-eyed Colin Powell stiffly at attention & lets his full-dress uniform tell the story. Decked out with medals, buttons, ribbons & epaulets, he could be a warrior from any age – a soldier of the Kaiser as seen (in color) by August Sander or, indeed, with the addition of a bronze helmet and horsehair plume, Achilles in his prime.

Leibovitz’s best portraits, it seems to me, declare their independence from the cult of personality. Feminist performance artist Karen Finley, for example, is shown from above, facedown nude on a sofa , her face invisible, turned away. Is she being seductive or is she hiding from the lens? It could be either. In performance, Finley famously shocked audiences by baring her body to elicit & comment on their complicated reactions to female sexuality. Her carefully lit nude body can certainly be seen here as a fetish. But look closer, she’s wearing lime green wool socks. A gaudy machine-made red blanket is slipping off her & onto the floor of an ordinary cluttered middle-class livingroom . Could the underground queen of fleshy polemic have simply fallen asleep at home? Is this any way to treat a star ?

Leibovitz – and her demigod subjects – come across best when she (and they) are willing to step down from Olympus. But would I like them as well if I hadn’t already glimpsed them in their glory? For example, take Leibovitz’s portrait of Mick Jagger. We’ve all seen Mick in the spotlight -- sneering & capering, his eyes flashing, a divine imp if ever there was one. Now we see him sitting quietly shirtless in a sparsely furnished hotel room. The picture was made in the last few years so Mick is definitely past 60. His hair is full & dark; his skin is smooth, his body is lean. He’s still beautiful. And he’s still helplessly vain. In the picture he’s undeniably sucking in his belly. See, stars are just people after all.

TO BE CONTD.

NOTE: I have a lot more to write & this is taking too long at a hellishly busy time in my life. I don’t want to chuck it. I need to get to my question in the 2nd graf “Why do so many of [Leibovitz’s portraits] piss me off?” The answer has to do with the rest of her show – the very large, very pretentious attempts at landscape, her photojournalism from Sarajevo, which frankly doesn’t seem very involved, & her small B & W family pictures, which focus on her parents, her children & her relationship with Susan Sontag -- & which she calls her best work. Especially these -- & what it means to exhibit them beside her better-known work. I’ll try to write this stuff soon (it was the reason I started writing in the 1st place),. Meanwhile, I’m going to post this as Part 1. Please comment. I’d love to know what you think of the Leibovitz show, or her work in general, or the ideas I’ve put down about her. What do you think?
Originally posted at 9:08PM, 10 November 2006 PST ( permalink )
colorstalker edited this topic 34 months ago.