October 20, 2006
Annie Leibovitz retrospective debuts in Brooklyn
There is something hard to define, but troubling, about Annie Leibovitz's show that opened today at the Brooklyn Museum.
One of the most powerful images in the collection is a Cabinet Room formal group pose of President Bush, Dick Cheney, Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Andrew Card and Donald Rumsfeld taken in December 2001. Except for Cheney's omnipresent smirk, their faces are difficult to read.
Leibovitz was asked Thursday during the media preview what makes that picture so uncomfortable to look at.
"I think it's the people," she said.
And maybe that's what's troubling about "Annie Leibozitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990 - 2005." The show's 197 photographs are a seamless mix of portraits of great artists, heroes, supermodels, advertising campaigns, her family, self-portraits and personal and private tragedy. Often they appear without captions, just as images push-pinned to the wall, sometimes with sticky notes, "date?" or locations scratched out and corrected in ink. (Paris, not Sarajevo.) The series of the death of her companion, Susan Sontag, are pinned near the floor on a long, informal panel of pictures.
"I don't have two lives,"Leibovitz said in introductory notes to the show. "This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it."
 In a car in Sarajevo in 1994, she witnessed a fatal attack on a young boy on a bicycle. The image of his bike next to his blood is in the show. Three pictures away there's an oversized and tousled Brad Pitt lounging in Las Vegas on a couch, also in 1994. A few feet away, bloody footprints on a bathroom wall in Rawanda, "traces of a massacre of Tutsi children and villagers." Captions, when offered, are brief, glossy.
For a culture endlessly fascinated by celebrity, Leibovitz repeatedly brings it home and makes it accessible. Hers, and thus ours, is a life populated by not just parents and children and friends, but Mick Jagger, Nicole Kidman, President Clinton, Eudora Welty, Leonardo DiCaprio, the White Stripes and Joan Didion. In the pictures, they often look kind of like us, as Ropert Murdoch does with his wind-blown hair while sailing off Alaska. And that Vanity Fair cover of pregnant, naked, bejeweled Demi Moore was originally meant just for Bruce and Demi, a photo shoot Leibovitz planted the idea for while shooting the couple's wedding pictures.
But there's no denying that Leibovitz is not like the rest of us, but rather more like the celebrities she helps galmourize. At Thursday's media preview she was mobbed by the photographers. Every movement she made while leading a "more intimate tour" of the exhibition, was recorded by dozens of eager international photographers.
"Annie Leibozitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990 - 2005" is on display through January 21 at the Brooklyn Museum, located at 200 Eastern Parkway, map.
Picture credits: (Top) Annie Leibovitz "Patti Smith with Her Children, Jackson and Jesse," 1996, Photographs © Annie Leibovitz from "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005"
Courtesy of Vanity Fair, provided for use by the Brooklyn Museum.
(Inset) Annie Leibovitz "Sarajevo," 1994 Photographs © Annie Leibovitz from "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005," provided for use by the Brooklyn Museum.
(Bottom) Annie Leibovitz mobbed at media preview. Credit: NewYorkology.
October 20, 2006 04:04 PM in Museums, Out of Manhattan, Sightsology
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