Through the Lens, Annie
what makes this an expensive photo book worth owning is that ultimately it is a self-portrait of the photographer.
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It's no surprise that Annie Leibovitz's new book, A Photographer's Life 1990-2005, is packed with celebrities from arts and politics, but what makes this an expensive photo book worth owning is that ultimately it is a self-portrait of the photographer.
Leibovitz, famous for getting her subjects to shed their clothes, even turns up naked herself this time, and that's not the half of it. This collection is a visual memoir at a critical time in her life, when both her father and her companion, writer Susan Sontag, were losing their battles with terminal illnesses. Leibovitz bravely records the events to their tragic ends, but there is no shortage of joy either, as revealed in photo studies of her large family, private moments with Sontag and the births of her children. She eclipses her famous nude photos of Demi Moore with equally stunning ones of herself pregnant at 51.
The essay on Sontag's physical decline with cancer is dramatic, without sentimentality. The terrain of Sontag's intellectual passions is caught in casual scenes in her New York apartment and traveling with Leibovitz in Europe. An arresting silhouette has Sontag between crags in the sandstone gorge of the ancient Jordanian city Petra, and opens a singular artistic journey for both women.
Leibovitz's covers for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue have made her a portraitist of our time. One of the most intoxicating aspects of her photography is that she can simultaneously geld and gild the arc of celebrity. She can dismiss the mountainous hubris of Mick Jagger, for instance, reclining bare-chested on a bed, by making him look caved-in and dignified. Scenes of action like Laurie Anderson hanging upside down on a crane hook, Chris Rock's whiteface photos, Nicole Kidman aloof in glamour or Vanessa Redgrave standing on a beachhead, are indelibly staged.
Her December 2001 portrait of Bush's cabinet is no less than a vital state document. Her wartime photos of Sarajevo, however, are absorbing but out of place in this volume. Some others are downright boring. Her aerial shots of divers, fighter jets and World Trade Center 9/11 vistas, for instance, are dimensionless.
But consider the portrait of choreographer Mark Morris smoking: Leibovitz evokes the perpetual drive of his mind — and in this collection, similarly records her own life, both in still images and in motion. "I don't have two lives," Leibovitz writes in the bare-bulb introduction. It is rare that a retrospective opens up aspects of the interior artist, instead of achieving more iconic distance. In this collection of more than 300 photographs, many pristinely reproduced, Leibovitz lets us stand next to her.
A Photographer's Life
By Annie Leibovitz
Random House, 472 pp., $75
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