Cindy Sherman Retrospective: An artist to be taken seriously
By Richard Phillips
18 August 1999
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is hosting a major retrospective by American artist/photographer Cindy Sherman. The exhibition, which includes photographs from the mid-1970s through to 1996, is jointly organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles and will be shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto after the Sydney season concludes on August 30.
Sherman first won artistic recognition for her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80)—a series of 69 enigmatic black-and-white self-portraits emulating movie publicity shots from the 1940s and 50s. Over the last 30 years she has risen to become the most widely known and financially successful art photographer in the United States. Her latest photographs are large colour prints of masks and dolls, as well as detailed arrangements of dummies, body parts and other inanimate objects.
Sherman's prints generally sell for between $20,000 and $50,000. A 20 x 25 centimetre print from the Untitled Film Stills series was recently auctioned by Christie's for a record $190,000—an unprecedented figure for a living artist/photographer. In 1996, New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $US1 million for the complete Untitled Film Stills series.
Much praise and numerous critiques have been published about Sherman. She has been elevated to virtual heroine status by a number of post-modernist ideologues. "Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman", an essay by Amelia Jones in the current exhibition's catalogue provides an example of the overblown verbiage used by some critics. [1] Those able to decipher this impenetrable essay will discover little substance, let alone any explanation of the evolution of Sherman's work over the last two decades, its strengths and, most importantly, some of its underlying weaknesses.
Born in New Jersey in 1954, Sherman grew up in suburban Long Island and attended the State University College in Buffalo, New York where she studied painting and photography. After initial difficulties with the technical aspects of photographic printmaking, Sherman was introduced to conceptual art and began using the camera to produce self-portraits. The first of these are included in the retrospective.
After graduation Sherman moved to New York with artist Robert Longo, and at the end of 1977 began to produce the first of her Untitled Film Stills. Using her apartment and a range of locations in and around New York City, Sherman's strangely nostalgic and lonely self-portraits record her masquerading as a range of characters: a blonde actress, a secretary, housewife, schoolgirl, a Latin film star and a young girl running away from home.
None of Sherman's photographs are titled, her aim being to force the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the works. "These are pictures of emotions personified, entirely of themselves with their own presence—not of me," Sherman commented in an earlier exhibition catalogue.
"The issue of the identity of the model is no more interesting than the possible symbolism of any other detail. When I prepare each character I have to consider what I'm working against; that people are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognisable. I'm trying to make other people recognise something of themselves rather than me."
In 1980-81, Sherman began using colour film and placed her invented characters in front of scenes projected onto backdrops. Known as the Rear Screen Projections, these photographs were inspired by television images and other contemporary visuals. These were followed by Centrefolds, photographs commissioned for the Artforum magazine. The larger-than-life images parodied semi-pornographic magazine photographs. Artforum rejected the pictures with some feminist critics claiming that Sherman was "reinforcing sexist stereotypes". The Pink Robe series followed in 1982 together with commission work for some prestigious fashion houses.
One of the most striking images from this period is her 1983 Untitled #122, a stark self-portrait in which Sherman wears a platinum blonde wig and shoulder-padded overcoat. The long blonde hair covers Sherman's face, one blood-shot eye is partially visible, her arms are by her side, and fists are tightly clenched. The character, who is charged with unreleased tension and anger, is ready to fly into a rage. What individuals or event, what sort of society, has produced this almost apoplectic state? The untitled photograph provides no real clues and therefore forces the viewers to find their own answers.
Fairy Tales (1985) marked another departure. Sherman began using a range of theatrical props and other accoutrements to create disturbing and partly comic images influenced by horror movies. This was followed by the History Portraits (1989-90), in which the artist, using plastic body parts and other bits and pieces, photographed herself as characters drawn from old master paintings, in particular Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus, Jean Fouquet's Madonna of Melun and Raphael's La Fornarina.
Sex Pictures (1992), Sherman's next major series, was produced in response to attacks on freedom of expression by the Christian Fundamentalists and extreme rightwing elements in the United States. It followed government amendments prohibiting the National Endowment for the Arts from providing grants for art work considered obscene and the attempted prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati over an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. Sherman's sexually explicit and partly abstract photographs mock conventional conceptions of obscenity and defied those demanding increased censorship. The photographs are a surreal combination of artificial body parts, fake genitalia and dismembered medical dummies in lewd poses.
The most recent photographs included in the current retrospective—the Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994-96)—are without doubt Sherman's most demanding images. Many have been favourably compared to paintings and prints by Hieronymous Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Francisco Goya; in particular Goya's Los Caprichos and his famous The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
These images fall into two categories: the mask portraits; and photographed arrangements of mannequins, toys, rotten garbage, broken domestic goods and unidentifiable waste products. More abstract in form, these works are intensely claustrophobic works, saturated with sadness and disillusionment. Many of these pictures are grotesque, challenge conventional conceptions of beauty, and demand that the viewer explore the darker depths of their subconscious and imagination—sensations and thoughts that generally only come to the surface during dreams or nightmares.
In a 1997 interview, Sherman explained that she started creating these images in an effort to more deeply examine and then transcend ordinary conceptions of beauty. "I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realise what you are looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest or the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side," she said.
Not all of this is successful. Some photographs are simply too clever or self-conscious. The History Portraits (1989-90) in my opinion represent an artistic and creative low. The images are little more than smug parodies of classical art portraiture and make no emotional connection, or provoke any inner exploration by the viewer. They contain none of the intense irreverence of the best Dadaist work or the mysterious radicalism of the Surrealists. The political message, drawn from the post-modernist schema, is obvious: civilisation and history is entirely subjective—something invented, to be chopped up and reconstituted according to one's own whim. History has no value, other than what it can provide for the immediate needs of those studying it.
It would be a mistake, though, to write off Sherman or conclude that this posturing—and there is an echo of this in the Sex Pictures —is a permanent feature of her work. The artist/photographer's less successful work, moreover, has to be understood within the social and intellectual conditions in which it was produced.
Sherman emerged in the rarified New York art scene during the 1980s. As art critic Robert Hughes explained in his essay, "The Decline of the City of Mahagonny":
"At the end of the eighties there may have been five hundred people in the world who could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents at all. Never before have the impulses of art appreciation and collecting been so nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display as in the late 1980s, and nowhere more so than in the United States".
And New York, Hughes declared, had become an "immense bourse in which every kind of art is traded for ever-escalating prices". A place of "premature canonizations and record bids, and the conversion of much of its museum system into a promotional machine".
The latest generation of American artists, according to Hughes, operate on the basis that "nature is dead, culture is all" and everything is "mediated to the point where nothing can be seen in its true quality". The inflated prices, art dealer speculation and vast amounts of media hype and premature careerism had so distorted the American art world "that a serious artist in New York must face the same unreality and weightlessness as a serious actor in Los Angeles."
So while the art market was booming, the artistic and intellectual life was being hollowed out with a predominance of overrated and mainly unemotional work. Typical, and especially from those influenced by the Andy Warhol school, was a tendency to blandly reproduce images from the popular media—film, television and advertising—in the belief that such presentations rebelled against traditional artistic values or represented some new initiative.
Sherman worked in, and was no doubt influenced by, these intellectually unfavourable conditions. But while popular cultural icons and conceptions were her starting point, Sherman's photographs rose above the trite and largely forgettable work then on display. Instead of passively recreating the images around her—frequently an indication that the artist has little to say—Sherman often made a real emotional connection and compelled her viewers to think.
Sherman is a serious artist who is attempting to explore, and perhaps understand more profoundly, some aspects of the disturbing social and psychic reality of society at the end of the 20th century. Her staged photographs and unsettling "still-life" arrangements are the means through she is conducting this exploration. Those approaching the retrospective with fixed ideas about what a photographer should or should not do will gain little from a visit to the exhibition. Those able to immerse themselves in her work will be rewarded.
Footnote
1. A typical paragraph:
"...Sherman's practice participates in what I have argued to be the opening of the subject to otherness (the baring of the circuits of desire connecting self and other in a dynamic of intersubjectivity) that gives what we might call postermodernism its most remarkable and particular antimodernist thrust. In feminist and phenomenological terms, the body, which instantiates the self, is a 'modality of reflexivity,' posing the subject in relation to the other in a reciprocal relationship; through gendered/sexual performances of the body, the subject is situated and situates herself through the other. The subject, then, is never complete within itself but is always contingent on others, and the glue of this intersubjectivity is the desire binding us together (the projective gaze is one mode of intersubjectivity but functions specifically to veil this contingency by projecting lack onto the other rather than admitting its own). It is the intersubjective dimension of Sherman's work that has largely been ignored (not surprisingly since it exposed the investedness and contingency of every reading of her pictures)."
["Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman", by Amelia Jones, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective; Thames and Hudson, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; 1997, page 33]
1. The main point that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Cindy Sherman:
a. is a famous photographer who makes between $20,000 and $50,000 a print.
b. only photographed herself.
c. is a photographer who, over the past 30 years, has made a prominent name for herself in the art world.
d. watched a lot of films for inspiration.
2. In the fourth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “verbiage.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. An overabundance of words
b. A critique
c. An compliment
d. A quick witted remark
3. What reasoning does the author provide for the lack of titles for Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills?
a. The artist was lazy
b. The artist didn’t want to give away any information
c. The hardest had writer’s block
d. The artist wanted viewers to draw their own conclusions
4. In the tenth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “apoplectic.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. A sudden loss of body control
b. To faint
c. To succumb to joy
d. To succumb to fear
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Math-Based Inquiry Five
Imagine you are matting a 2' by 5' print. Create a sketch illustrating the proper dimensions for a 5" and 5 1/2" border surrounding.
Math-Based Inquiry Four
You are preparing to take a blurred action image outdoors. When referencing your light meter, you discover that you have too much light with the current settings. Your teacher instructs you to decrease two stops. If your aperture is set to f/4 and your shutter is set to 15, what will you change, and to what denomination?
Math-Based Inquiry Three
You are preparing to take a stop action image outdoors. When referencing your light meter, you discover that you do not have enough light with the current settings. Your teacher instructs you to increase two stops. If your aperture is set to f/5.6 and your shutter is set to 1000, what will you change, and to what denomination?
Math-Based Inquiry Two
Imagine you are matting a 16" by 20" print. Create a sketch illustrating the proper dimensions for a 3" and 3 1/2" border surrounding.
Math-Based Inquiry One
Imagine you are matting a 4" by 5" print. Create a sketch illustrating the proper dimensions for a 2" and 2 1/2" border surrounding.
Reading Prompt Five
From The Sunday Times October 5, 2008
Report by Cathy Galvin.
Annie Leibovitz: Nothing left to hide
The rich, famous and powerful will do almost anything to be immortalized by Annie Leibovitz. But now it’s her turn in the spotlight — and she is ready to be as candid as her photographs.
Annie Leibovitz is marching towards destiny with a giant stride – and today it’s her fate to be photographed for this magazine. It’s not a thing she welcomes. The most famous female portrait photographer in the world is about to be scrutinized by one of the trendiest. She knows he’ll be focusing on every line in her 59-year-old face – “But I don’t want to be an idiot about it,” she says. So instead she’s encouraging me to keep up as we bounce from her offices to a nearby studio in Greenwich Village, New York.
Awaiting her is the diminutive Platon: dynamic young photographers love a bold brand name. She’s nervous, muttering: “What do I call him? Plat?” We’re crushed into what appears to be a large black box with just enough room for Leibovitz and her assistants, Chad and Kathryn, Platon and his team of three, and some scorching lights. I’m on the floor, watching Little Platon and Big Annie, him at her knees in every sense as he stares up at her. “Couldn’t you get a ditch dug in your studio?” she quips as he pleads for her to keep still. He adores her but he seems to adore everyone, and I know she’s clocked that. His technique is to hunker down and shoot up at his subjects, a plankton’s perspective on the world. “The smallest movements, Annie, the smallest movements,” he begs.
Leibovitz is a challenge. For any woman, such close examination is agonizing, but the pain is even greater for someone who lives their life behind, not in front of, the lens. She’s gripping her camera for support, determined to make her face and body obey him, but her booming voice rebels: “Kathryn. Where’s Kathryn? Can we have some good music here? I’m going crazy. Have you got some Springsteen? Some early Dylan? Some Emmylou?”
He wants her to look down, but every atom in her body is exploding with an instinctive aversion to that instruction. Her iconic status in the photographic pantheon is based on stamina, 35 years of consistent and often brilliant work, not neurosis. We may like our heroines to have a touch of the tragic about them, but she’s having none of it. “I do not want to look sad,” she tells me later, though in the moment she wants to help. At one point she can’t contain herself any longer, grabs a camera and shoots back at him.
He tries to chat, to warm her up – not something she has much time for. She’s written: “I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me.” When he questions her about her mother, she patiently explains that she died not too long ago. So, as it happens, did her father and her lover, the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag. When he asks, in the same way he once apparently asked President Bill Clinton, to “give him love”, she roars with laughter. All the while, she’s giving him a masterclass. The key to success, she says, is to go back: “Don’t think that you’ve got it from one sitting. If you don’t like what you see, go back. I do it all the time. Build relationships. It has to be intimate.”
None of it, she’s suggesting – the body of work, the attention, the reputation – comes in a moment. And none of it necessarily reveals the soul of the sitter or the photographer. She sees what she does as a series of one-dimensional fragments in a complex world. “What is reality anyway?” she asks me.
It’s a good question, and one that has a particular bearing on the flood of celebrity portraits she’s been shooting for magazines and advertising campaigns since the 1980s, photographs that helped define a particular era. When her cover shot of Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, appeared in 1991, some outlets displayed it in a white wrapper. There were howls of protest, followed by applause for her daring feminist take on female nudity, none of which she had intended. She simply loved the picture.
The range of her portraiture is breathtaking: from her trademark Hollywood group shots, as lavish as any film set, to quirky conceptual pieces – Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk or John Cleese dangling from a tree – to her elegant black-and-white portraits of dancers, writers and musicians. The Queen, according to the BBC, stormed out of a session with Leibovitz at Buckingham Palace last year. In fact, she was storming in. And they’re all at it –Hollywood stars, international politicians, big corporates and magazines, all rushing towards her, ready to fly her anywhere, pay her anything, in the hope she will immortalise them. It’s formidable work, and the familiarity of it can breed contempt. The photographic critic Vicki Goldberg once said Leibovitz had captured a culture, “and what a shabby culture it is”. Leibovitz is aware of that tension: selling a cover has little to do with truth or art.
What’s real for Leibovitz comes in the shape of three-year-old twins, Susan and Samuelle, angelic girls in a halo of blonde curls who are playing at dressing up in their bedroom at the top of a fairy-tale brownstone house. They’re at the centre of a personal reappraisal of her life and work. She wants to snatch a few moments with them before I skitter after her to the dreaded photoshoot. When I ask how many people there are in Team Leibovitz, from studio, personal and photographic assistants to housekeepers and nannies, she laughs. She laughs a great deal, despite the austere appearance. There’s no definitive answer because she’s absorbed in tickling Samuelle, and I get drawn in to the play, but it’s a significant number. There’s a business, two homes – one here at the heart of New York and a 200-acre estate at Rhinebeck, near the Hudson river – to run with her staff. You notice the portraits around the house, because they aren’t by Leibovitz. “I’ve got enough pictures of the children. I want to be with them, not photograph them,” she says. Scattered about are snapshots of some of the wider Leibovitz clan, many in sepia. She’s collating their family past and saving it for her children and five siblings.
At around the age of 50, Leibovitz made the bold, unconventional and life-changing decision to have children. It was her choice to be a single mother, not one that involved Sontag assuming the role of second parent. She doesn’t discuss it. Her first child, Sarah, was born in October 2001, reportedly by sperm donor, when she was 51; the twins arrived by surrogate birth 3½ years later.
The other reality for Leibovitz is contained within the vast range of her photography over a lifetime: her love affair with reportage, not studio, photography. It’s work that can still astonish. At her best, her journalistic instinct is acute. It was this that allowed her to take the remarkable photograph of a naked John Lennon coiled against the clothed figure of Yoko Ono just hours before he was killed in December 1980; to virtually live with the Rolling Stones and shoot some of the most memorable reportage of the 1970s. From the moment she left the San Francisco Art Institute and student photography to pursue a dizzying magazine career with the embryonic Rolling Stone magazine, hitting the road with the writers Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe and establishing herself as the leading music photographer of the time, she felt guilt that her photography wasn’t art: “But that’s the thing that drives the work, that tension between selling out and not selling out, doing it or not doing it, and I still maintain magazines are interesting vehicles for doing it. Sometimes you get squashed and then sometimes you just break through and you get to do something that’s a complete surprise.”
This month, a retrospective of her work, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, drawn from photographs that appeared in a book of the same name in 2006, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition celebrates her personal story: hanging with memorable portraits of celebrity and power are gentler images that capture those moments when supercharged Leibovitz has stood still. There are surprises: landscapes, family photographs, erotic memories, even some war images, the private collection of a very public figure, at times disturbingly intimate.
It’s an account of the years 1990 to 2005, the years she spent with Susan Sontag, before both Sontag and her father died – Sontag in December 2004 and her father, Samuel, in early February the following year. The project began when she started to sift through undeveloped film and other personal images to find images of Sontag for her memorial service. She dismisses the idea those years were intense: “Yes of course, but everyone has this. We’re going to have babies and we’re going to die. This is everyman’s story.”
Yes and no. That collision of life and death in her middle years has changed Leibovitz’s work. It’s softer in the sense of being more revealing, yet carries the distinctive toughness of her journalistic instinct. Not everyone could reveal their own experiences of mortality in this way, or the experience of their loved ones.
In addition to the book and soon-to-open exhibition, another book called Annie Leibovitz at Work, aimed at answering every question that a young photographer might want to ask her, is published this month. All this retrospective introspection marks her awareness of her legacy: the story she will be leaving behind for her fans, her family, for history. What will she be remembered for – her shots of Demi Moore naked, or those that appeared in A Photographer’s Life of her father and Susan Sontag dead? Or something else entirely – other work still to be published?
Few who see the exhibition will fail to be impressed by Leibovitz’s scale and range; some will argue about whether a magazine photographer’s output can be of lasting quality. She’s unsure what the verdict will be on her life and work. “I remember meeting [the legendary US photographer] Ansel Adams in his late seventies, and they had him in his dark room – he only came out for five minutes – working on his master set. He did a whole series of master sets, and it’s interesting to think along those lines… The thing that holds up, the thing that is remarkable, that I can stand outside of myself and look at and feel so lucky, is that it’s all getting more interesting.”
There are also regrets. She swings between confidence in her achievements and a rawness that shows it’s too soon to have recovered from her losses. For all the pleasure in showing her family pictures, she knows that she and others have paid a price.
Did any of the family try to stop her showing their private moments; their struggle to cope with her father’s death and his death-bed scene? “My mom. I showed my mom the book and she was worried about pictures of my dad and then she let it go. When I look back now, I wouldn’t do what I did then. In Paris [the exhibition was held there this summer] when I was walking through the show, oh my gosh, I realised I’d left my family so vulnerable. God knows why you do it, on some level, but it came out of these moments and I won’t do it again. I won’t touch my family again. I have great respect for that moment – you know it was crazed and sad and vulnerable, and it’s probably my best work.” Visitors to the exhibition will find themselves drawn to a small black-and-white photograph that carries a heavy weight of bitterness, the most controversial she has taken. It shows the body of Susan Sontag laid out in a funeral home, her once beautiful, distinctive face almost unrecognisable, racked by the struggle to beat a virulent form of blood cancer. Leibovitz acknowledges: “There are good deaths and bad deaths. And Susan’s was a bad death.” The image spares the viewer nothing.
Earlier this year, I had interviewed Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, who has written an anguished account of his mother’s death and is now editing her journals and letters. When I tell her this, it throws her. She’s known for checking out her interviewers, and has earlier told me how many children I have and listed some of the more inane projects I’ve worked on as proof of her investigative powers, but this detail had escaped her. She asks her assistant, Karen, to bring her the article, and reads it in front of me. In it, Rieff makes plain his contempt for Leibovitz – not for taking the photograph, but for showing it in her book and exhibition. “I think she had a choice. But for whatever purposes it served in her psyche or her career, there was no way I could stop her,” he had said.
It’s clear the two of them were uncomfortable with each other while Sontag was alive, and Leibovitz comments on their capacity to have made each other miserable after Sontag’s death. Rieff called Leibovitz Sontag’s “on-again, off-again lover”, while friends of Leibovitz recall the abruptness of Rieff’s behaviour in death, failing to acknowledge the love and support Leibovitz had offered his mother during her life. She had renovated a cottage for Sontag on her estate, had bought both of them a home at the Quai des Grands-Augustins in Paris; and had chartered planes to take Sontag to hospital for a bone-marrow transplant and later back to New York.
Recovering herself, Leibovitz says: “I showed the book to everyone I was worried about before it was published – with the exception of David Rieff. Most of those people were close to Susan, like Joan Didion and Susan’s sister, Judith. The most important person I showed it to was Andrew Wylie [Sontag’s agent], who knows David and was executor of Susan’s estate, and he was very supportive and said leave David to me and I’ll talk to him.”
She says of Rieff’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, which charts his mother’s final months: “I thought it was terrible. Only because it was so cold. But if you notice, nobody else was there in David’s book except David.”
But was she there for Susan’s final moments? “I wasn’t there. It was the first death that I ever experienced. Would I do it differently now? I certainly would. But at the time even David was going away, and my father was dying. I had this trip to Florida to see him, and I was taking my Christmas vacation and splitting it between Susan and my father… so I was with Susan up until that Sunday, and she said I love you and I said goodbye, and I left and felt sure she’d be fine for a few days. Then I got down to Florida and had literally just landed, and David called me and said there was a turn for the worse. I tried to get on a plane to get back, and there wasn’t a plane until the morning. She died when I was in the plane. “I begged him to keep her there until I saw her, and he did. In retrospect, David was desperately trying to hold on to his mother in some way, and of course pushed everyone else away – and it was painful to a lot of people. He had a lot to deal with.”
Has she questioned her decision to keep the picture of Sontag in the funeral home in the exhibition? In her book, Leibovitz admits she was in a trance when she took the picture, and had provided Sontag’s funeral clothes: a dress they had bought in Milan, scarves from Venice, a favourite black velvet coat she liked to wear to the theatre. “No, I think it is a strong picture. I have absolutely no problem about it. I think there’s a genre to it and I’m a photographer and I feel like it was totally appropriate.” She wouldn’t release the picture for publication here.
We can’t know what Sontag would have thought. She loved photography, wrote eloquently about its cultural impact and there’s something prescient about one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), an analysis of how horrific images can make voyeurs of us all. Sontag had encouraged Leibovitz to broaden her work, and the two had travelled together twice to Sarajevo during the Serbian siege. In her book, Sontag notes: “People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them.” She also wrote: “Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”
Leibovitz continues: “I went down to the funeral home and I did it. I think David is quoted as saying it was some kind of circus-like picture. I shot it with a digital camera, and I got home and the printing machine had run out of ink, and it came out this kind of strange green, which I thought was interesting at the time… it just happened.” Those painful green images make a spread in the book.
She doesn’t attempt to present either the book or the exhibition as a kind of truth: it is, she says, a moment: “You see things in the work. You can start to create fictions some time. That’s all right. The whole thing is a kind of fiction. We made up a story for you to see… there’s just enough pictures to tell a story.”
And what drives Annie’s own story? The sense of never stopping for breath? It began young, the patterns established in childhood. Anna-Lou Leibovitz has been on the move since the day she was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1949. Her father was in the air force, and the family – she was lost in the middle of five siblings – were used to being bundled in the car and transported from base to base, the classic American road story. They never stayed anywhere long. There were fights between them all: “I think the fact that we were on the move saved us. It kept us together, and it’s interesting because I’m thinking now what it must be like for my kids growing up in one spot; because for us, for good or bad, the fact we were moving every couple of years, it solved all our problems. I never even knew you saw people again. That made us closer, because your siblings became your best friends and you travelled together. I do see a parallel with taking pictures – you go in for a quick study and you get out.”
Leibovitz was the third child in an exuberant, physical family. Their vitality, and her love of them, bursts out of the photographs on display in the book and exhibition: strong father and brother; a mother who had been a dancer. None of them afraid of the camera. “There were kind of two halves. I had an older brother I was enamoured with, and an older sister who was a bit too old for me… so I was the youngest of the oldest set and the oldest of the younger set.
“When I got older, I felt like I was totally abandoned. I was left to my own devices pretty much. And by the time I was older my mom was too pooped to do too much with me.
“If you talk to my siblings, they just can’t sit down. I think there’s something chemically wrong with us all! We all have this kind of workaholism – I think they’ve now labelled it attention deficit disorder. I’m sure there’s something in that.”
Others have observed her inability to settle, including Susan Sontag, whom she met in 1988. “She said I was always passing through.” Another kind of speed caught up with her in the 1970s, when she became briefly addicted to drugs. “Cocaine propelled you. It kept you believing you were thinking,” she has said.
I suggest she thrives on being at the calm centre of chaos, but she says the rush is over: “When I had the children, I finally hit the wall. Okay, it just seemed like you were going and going and going – and then you had the children and you are finally filled up. It takes care of every single thing that you have, even to the point that you realise you have too much to do, and you try to figure out how to manage that the best you can.”
It’s unstated but evident that Leibovitz worries her children may be left without her before they are grown up. “I feel like a summer-camp director. Having a family, especially being a single mother, having the sense of family for my children is so important, so that they understand there’s this extended family.
You know, I probably work to see my siblings more than I would – just so my children understand they are not alone, that they have a bigger family. With my parents gone [her mother died last year], I thought I’d maybe have a break from my brothers and sisters for a while – but on the contrary, we kind of closed rank.” She spends August at Rhinebeck with the children and an assortment of her siblings, nephews and nieces. At an age when others consider stepping off the treadmill, Leibovitz is flirting with the idea of slowing down – a little. She may work a four-day week from July.
The feminist writer Gloria Steinem once said of Leibovitz that she was the most authoritative, uncertain person she knew. It’s easy to see why, particularly at this point in her life: “You absolutely continue to question what you’ve done. It’s an interesting time. I was very pleased when A Photographer’s Life was published: I’d been trying to express that work for so long, and it has emotional impact. You get that opportunity in your lifetime – where you know that you really did do art; though you really didn’t know what you did until you’d done it.”
Now she wants to make time for more projects close to her heart. “Because of the children, I have a cause. I have to question myself about whether I am doing what I want to do or should be doing, and I’m trying to sort it out.” Meanwhile, the jobs roll in, including presidential candidate Barack Obama for Men’s Vogue, though she recently said no to his running mate, Joe Biden, because she wants to work fewer weekends. The Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would, however, be irresistible.
Who makes her laugh? She roars. Pointing at her facial muscles she says: “These muscles are so underused… I’m not kidding! There are those people who never smile and they just get that look? And then when I had the children – my Samuelle is like my own little Lindsay Lohan, a little troublemaker: if she can put her finger in a socket, she’ll do it. But you have to admire her. It’s funny how they come out of the box like that.
“I have to say right now I haven’t quite figured out how to walk and chew gum at the same time. I go to bed pretty early and I’m with the kids and I don’t really go out that much – and it’s pretty much work or kids, work or kids… What the hell – but it’s definitely a two-man job. I’d like to have one more relationship in my life. I’ve always had great help and a great nanny but…”
She may be taking a quieter road – and a tough one – but the Leibovitz journey is far from over. “Beautiful, Annie. F***ing wicked,” Platon had barked at the end of our photo shoot. It’s hard not to agree.
1. The main points that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Annie Leibovitz:
a. is a famous photographer and mother.
b. only photographed celebrities.
c. even amongst scrutinization, remains true to herself as an artist.
d. has twin children, whom she incorporates into her photography often.
2. In the third paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “quips.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. A sharp sarcastic remark
b. A serious uttering
c. An innuendo
d. A sharp gesture with the hand
3. In the tenth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “austere.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. silly
b. beautiful
c. regal
d. severe
4. According to the author, what was Leibovitz’s most controversial image?
a. The image depicting a nude Demi Moore
b. The image depicting Susan Sontag’s death
c. The image depicting her father’s death
d. The image depicting John Cleese dangling from a tree
Report by Cathy Galvin.
Annie Leibovitz: Nothing left to hide
The rich, famous and powerful will do almost anything to be immortalized by Annie Leibovitz. But now it’s her turn in the spotlight — and she is ready to be as candid as her photographs.
Annie Leibovitz is marching towards destiny with a giant stride – and today it’s her fate to be photographed for this magazine. It’s not a thing she welcomes. The most famous female portrait photographer in the world is about to be scrutinized by one of the trendiest. She knows he’ll be focusing on every line in her 59-year-old face – “But I don’t want to be an idiot about it,” she says. So instead she’s encouraging me to keep up as we bounce from her offices to a nearby studio in Greenwich Village, New York.
Awaiting her is the diminutive Platon: dynamic young photographers love a bold brand name. She’s nervous, muttering: “What do I call him? Plat?” We’re crushed into what appears to be a large black box with just enough room for Leibovitz and her assistants, Chad and Kathryn, Platon and his team of three, and some scorching lights. I’m on the floor, watching Little Platon and Big Annie, him at her knees in every sense as he stares up at her. “Couldn’t you get a ditch dug in your studio?” she quips as he pleads for her to keep still. He adores her but he seems to adore everyone, and I know she’s clocked that. His technique is to hunker down and shoot up at his subjects, a plankton’s perspective on the world. “The smallest movements, Annie, the smallest movements,” he begs.
Leibovitz is a challenge. For any woman, such close examination is agonizing, but the pain is even greater for someone who lives their life behind, not in front of, the lens. She’s gripping her camera for support, determined to make her face and body obey him, but her booming voice rebels: “Kathryn. Where’s Kathryn? Can we have some good music here? I’m going crazy. Have you got some Springsteen? Some early Dylan? Some Emmylou?”
He wants her to look down, but every atom in her body is exploding with an instinctive aversion to that instruction. Her iconic status in the photographic pantheon is based on stamina, 35 years of consistent and often brilliant work, not neurosis. We may like our heroines to have a touch of the tragic about them, but she’s having none of it. “I do not want to look sad,” she tells me later, though in the moment she wants to help. At one point she can’t contain herself any longer, grabs a camera and shoots back at him.
He tries to chat, to warm her up – not something she has much time for. She’s written: “I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me.” When he questions her about her mother, she patiently explains that she died not too long ago. So, as it happens, did her father and her lover, the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag. When he asks, in the same way he once apparently asked President Bill Clinton, to “give him love”, she roars with laughter. All the while, she’s giving him a masterclass. The key to success, she says, is to go back: “Don’t think that you’ve got it from one sitting. If you don’t like what you see, go back. I do it all the time. Build relationships. It has to be intimate.”
None of it, she’s suggesting – the body of work, the attention, the reputation – comes in a moment. And none of it necessarily reveals the soul of the sitter or the photographer. She sees what she does as a series of one-dimensional fragments in a complex world. “What is reality anyway?” she asks me.
It’s a good question, and one that has a particular bearing on the flood of celebrity portraits she’s been shooting for magazines and advertising campaigns since the 1980s, photographs that helped define a particular era. When her cover shot of Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, appeared in 1991, some outlets displayed it in a white wrapper. There were howls of protest, followed by applause for her daring feminist take on female nudity, none of which she had intended. She simply loved the picture.
The range of her portraiture is breathtaking: from her trademark Hollywood group shots, as lavish as any film set, to quirky conceptual pieces – Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk or John Cleese dangling from a tree – to her elegant black-and-white portraits of dancers, writers and musicians. The Queen, according to the BBC, stormed out of a session with Leibovitz at Buckingham Palace last year. In fact, she was storming in. And they’re all at it –Hollywood stars, international politicians, big corporates and magazines, all rushing towards her, ready to fly her anywhere, pay her anything, in the hope she will immortalise them. It’s formidable work, and the familiarity of it can breed contempt. The photographic critic Vicki Goldberg once said Leibovitz had captured a culture, “and what a shabby culture it is”. Leibovitz is aware of that tension: selling a cover has little to do with truth or art.
What’s real for Leibovitz comes in the shape of three-year-old twins, Susan and Samuelle, angelic girls in a halo of blonde curls who are playing at dressing up in their bedroom at the top of a fairy-tale brownstone house. They’re at the centre of a personal reappraisal of her life and work. She wants to snatch a few moments with them before I skitter after her to the dreaded photoshoot. When I ask how many people there are in Team Leibovitz, from studio, personal and photographic assistants to housekeepers and nannies, she laughs. She laughs a great deal, despite the austere appearance. There’s no definitive answer because she’s absorbed in tickling Samuelle, and I get drawn in to the play, but it’s a significant number. There’s a business, two homes – one here at the heart of New York and a 200-acre estate at Rhinebeck, near the Hudson river – to run with her staff. You notice the portraits around the house, because they aren’t by Leibovitz. “I’ve got enough pictures of the children. I want to be with them, not photograph them,” she says. Scattered about are snapshots of some of the wider Leibovitz clan, many in sepia. She’s collating their family past and saving it for her children and five siblings.
At around the age of 50, Leibovitz made the bold, unconventional and life-changing decision to have children. It was her choice to be a single mother, not one that involved Sontag assuming the role of second parent. She doesn’t discuss it. Her first child, Sarah, was born in October 2001, reportedly by sperm donor, when she was 51; the twins arrived by surrogate birth 3½ years later.
The other reality for Leibovitz is contained within the vast range of her photography over a lifetime: her love affair with reportage, not studio, photography. It’s work that can still astonish. At her best, her journalistic instinct is acute. It was this that allowed her to take the remarkable photograph of a naked John Lennon coiled against the clothed figure of Yoko Ono just hours before he was killed in December 1980; to virtually live with the Rolling Stones and shoot some of the most memorable reportage of the 1970s. From the moment she left the San Francisco Art Institute and student photography to pursue a dizzying magazine career with the embryonic Rolling Stone magazine, hitting the road with the writers Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe and establishing herself as the leading music photographer of the time, she felt guilt that her photography wasn’t art: “But that’s the thing that drives the work, that tension between selling out and not selling out, doing it or not doing it, and I still maintain magazines are interesting vehicles for doing it. Sometimes you get squashed and then sometimes you just break through and you get to do something that’s a complete surprise.”
This month, a retrospective of her work, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, drawn from photographs that appeared in a book of the same name in 2006, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition celebrates her personal story: hanging with memorable portraits of celebrity and power are gentler images that capture those moments when supercharged Leibovitz has stood still. There are surprises: landscapes, family photographs, erotic memories, even some war images, the private collection of a very public figure, at times disturbingly intimate.
It’s an account of the years 1990 to 2005, the years she spent with Susan Sontag, before both Sontag and her father died – Sontag in December 2004 and her father, Samuel, in early February the following year. The project began when she started to sift through undeveloped film and other personal images to find images of Sontag for her memorial service. She dismisses the idea those years were intense: “Yes of course, but everyone has this. We’re going to have babies and we’re going to die. This is everyman’s story.”
Yes and no. That collision of life and death in her middle years has changed Leibovitz’s work. It’s softer in the sense of being more revealing, yet carries the distinctive toughness of her journalistic instinct. Not everyone could reveal their own experiences of mortality in this way, or the experience of their loved ones.
In addition to the book and soon-to-open exhibition, another book called Annie Leibovitz at Work, aimed at answering every question that a young photographer might want to ask her, is published this month. All this retrospective introspection marks her awareness of her legacy: the story she will be leaving behind for her fans, her family, for history. What will she be remembered for – her shots of Demi Moore naked, or those that appeared in A Photographer’s Life of her father and Susan Sontag dead? Or something else entirely – other work still to be published?
Few who see the exhibition will fail to be impressed by Leibovitz’s scale and range; some will argue about whether a magazine photographer’s output can be of lasting quality. She’s unsure what the verdict will be on her life and work. “I remember meeting [the legendary US photographer] Ansel Adams in his late seventies, and they had him in his dark room – he only came out for five minutes – working on his master set. He did a whole series of master sets, and it’s interesting to think along those lines… The thing that holds up, the thing that is remarkable, that I can stand outside of myself and look at and feel so lucky, is that it’s all getting more interesting.”
There are also regrets. She swings between confidence in her achievements and a rawness that shows it’s too soon to have recovered from her losses. For all the pleasure in showing her family pictures, she knows that she and others have paid a price.
Did any of the family try to stop her showing their private moments; their struggle to cope with her father’s death and his death-bed scene? “My mom. I showed my mom the book and she was worried about pictures of my dad and then she let it go. When I look back now, I wouldn’t do what I did then. In Paris [the exhibition was held there this summer] when I was walking through the show, oh my gosh, I realised I’d left my family so vulnerable. God knows why you do it, on some level, but it came out of these moments and I won’t do it again. I won’t touch my family again. I have great respect for that moment – you know it was crazed and sad and vulnerable, and it’s probably my best work.” Visitors to the exhibition will find themselves drawn to a small black-and-white photograph that carries a heavy weight of bitterness, the most controversial she has taken. It shows the body of Susan Sontag laid out in a funeral home, her once beautiful, distinctive face almost unrecognisable, racked by the struggle to beat a virulent form of blood cancer. Leibovitz acknowledges: “There are good deaths and bad deaths. And Susan’s was a bad death.” The image spares the viewer nothing.
Earlier this year, I had interviewed Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, who has written an anguished account of his mother’s death and is now editing her journals and letters. When I tell her this, it throws her. She’s known for checking out her interviewers, and has earlier told me how many children I have and listed some of the more inane projects I’ve worked on as proof of her investigative powers, but this detail had escaped her. She asks her assistant, Karen, to bring her the article, and reads it in front of me. In it, Rieff makes plain his contempt for Leibovitz – not for taking the photograph, but for showing it in her book and exhibition. “I think she had a choice. But for whatever purposes it served in her psyche or her career, there was no way I could stop her,” he had said.
It’s clear the two of them were uncomfortable with each other while Sontag was alive, and Leibovitz comments on their capacity to have made each other miserable after Sontag’s death. Rieff called Leibovitz Sontag’s “on-again, off-again lover”, while friends of Leibovitz recall the abruptness of Rieff’s behaviour in death, failing to acknowledge the love and support Leibovitz had offered his mother during her life. She had renovated a cottage for Sontag on her estate, had bought both of them a home at the Quai des Grands-Augustins in Paris; and had chartered planes to take Sontag to hospital for a bone-marrow transplant and later back to New York.
Recovering herself, Leibovitz says: “I showed the book to everyone I was worried about before it was published – with the exception of David Rieff. Most of those people were close to Susan, like Joan Didion and Susan’s sister, Judith. The most important person I showed it to was Andrew Wylie [Sontag’s agent], who knows David and was executor of Susan’s estate, and he was very supportive and said leave David to me and I’ll talk to him.”
She says of Rieff’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, which charts his mother’s final months: “I thought it was terrible. Only because it was so cold. But if you notice, nobody else was there in David’s book except David.”
But was she there for Susan’s final moments? “I wasn’t there. It was the first death that I ever experienced. Would I do it differently now? I certainly would. But at the time even David was going away, and my father was dying. I had this trip to Florida to see him, and I was taking my Christmas vacation and splitting it between Susan and my father… so I was with Susan up until that Sunday, and she said I love you and I said goodbye, and I left and felt sure she’d be fine for a few days. Then I got down to Florida and had literally just landed, and David called me and said there was a turn for the worse. I tried to get on a plane to get back, and there wasn’t a plane until the morning. She died when I was in the plane. “I begged him to keep her there until I saw her, and he did. In retrospect, David was desperately trying to hold on to his mother in some way, and of course pushed everyone else away – and it was painful to a lot of people. He had a lot to deal with.”
Has she questioned her decision to keep the picture of Sontag in the funeral home in the exhibition? In her book, Leibovitz admits she was in a trance when she took the picture, and had provided Sontag’s funeral clothes: a dress they had bought in Milan, scarves from Venice, a favourite black velvet coat she liked to wear to the theatre. “No, I think it is a strong picture. I have absolutely no problem about it. I think there’s a genre to it and I’m a photographer and I feel like it was totally appropriate.” She wouldn’t release the picture for publication here.
We can’t know what Sontag would have thought. She loved photography, wrote eloquently about its cultural impact and there’s something prescient about one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), an analysis of how horrific images can make voyeurs of us all. Sontag had encouraged Leibovitz to broaden her work, and the two had travelled together twice to Sarajevo during the Serbian siege. In her book, Sontag notes: “People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them.” She also wrote: “Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”
Leibovitz continues: “I went down to the funeral home and I did it. I think David is quoted as saying it was some kind of circus-like picture. I shot it with a digital camera, and I got home and the printing machine had run out of ink, and it came out this kind of strange green, which I thought was interesting at the time… it just happened.” Those painful green images make a spread in the book.
She doesn’t attempt to present either the book or the exhibition as a kind of truth: it is, she says, a moment: “You see things in the work. You can start to create fictions some time. That’s all right. The whole thing is a kind of fiction. We made up a story for you to see… there’s just enough pictures to tell a story.”
And what drives Annie’s own story? The sense of never stopping for breath? It began young, the patterns established in childhood. Anna-Lou Leibovitz has been on the move since the day she was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1949. Her father was in the air force, and the family – she was lost in the middle of five siblings – were used to being bundled in the car and transported from base to base, the classic American road story. They never stayed anywhere long. There were fights between them all: “I think the fact that we were on the move saved us. It kept us together, and it’s interesting because I’m thinking now what it must be like for my kids growing up in one spot; because for us, for good or bad, the fact we were moving every couple of years, it solved all our problems. I never even knew you saw people again. That made us closer, because your siblings became your best friends and you travelled together. I do see a parallel with taking pictures – you go in for a quick study and you get out.”
Leibovitz was the third child in an exuberant, physical family. Their vitality, and her love of them, bursts out of the photographs on display in the book and exhibition: strong father and brother; a mother who had been a dancer. None of them afraid of the camera. “There were kind of two halves. I had an older brother I was enamoured with, and an older sister who was a bit too old for me… so I was the youngest of the oldest set and the oldest of the younger set.
“When I got older, I felt like I was totally abandoned. I was left to my own devices pretty much. And by the time I was older my mom was too pooped to do too much with me.
“If you talk to my siblings, they just can’t sit down. I think there’s something chemically wrong with us all! We all have this kind of workaholism – I think they’ve now labelled it attention deficit disorder. I’m sure there’s something in that.”
Others have observed her inability to settle, including Susan Sontag, whom she met in 1988. “She said I was always passing through.” Another kind of speed caught up with her in the 1970s, when she became briefly addicted to drugs. “Cocaine propelled you. It kept you believing you were thinking,” she has said.
I suggest she thrives on being at the calm centre of chaos, but she says the rush is over: “When I had the children, I finally hit the wall. Okay, it just seemed like you were going and going and going – and then you had the children and you are finally filled up. It takes care of every single thing that you have, even to the point that you realise you have too much to do, and you try to figure out how to manage that the best you can.”
It’s unstated but evident that Leibovitz worries her children may be left without her before they are grown up. “I feel like a summer-camp director. Having a family, especially being a single mother, having the sense of family for my children is so important, so that they understand there’s this extended family.
You know, I probably work to see my siblings more than I would – just so my children understand they are not alone, that they have a bigger family. With my parents gone [her mother died last year], I thought I’d maybe have a break from my brothers and sisters for a while – but on the contrary, we kind of closed rank.” She spends August at Rhinebeck with the children and an assortment of her siblings, nephews and nieces. At an age when others consider stepping off the treadmill, Leibovitz is flirting with the idea of slowing down – a little. She may work a four-day week from July.
The feminist writer Gloria Steinem once said of Leibovitz that she was the most authoritative, uncertain person she knew. It’s easy to see why, particularly at this point in her life: “You absolutely continue to question what you’ve done. It’s an interesting time. I was very pleased when A Photographer’s Life was published: I’d been trying to express that work for so long, and it has emotional impact. You get that opportunity in your lifetime – where you know that you really did do art; though you really didn’t know what you did until you’d done it.”
Now she wants to make time for more projects close to her heart. “Because of the children, I have a cause. I have to question myself about whether I am doing what I want to do or should be doing, and I’m trying to sort it out.” Meanwhile, the jobs roll in, including presidential candidate Barack Obama for Men’s Vogue, though she recently said no to his running mate, Joe Biden, because she wants to work fewer weekends. The Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would, however, be irresistible.
Who makes her laugh? She roars. Pointing at her facial muscles she says: “These muscles are so underused… I’m not kidding! There are those people who never smile and they just get that look? And then when I had the children – my Samuelle is like my own little Lindsay Lohan, a little troublemaker: if she can put her finger in a socket, she’ll do it. But you have to admire her. It’s funny how they come out of the box like that.
“I have to say right now I haven’t quite figured out how to walk and chew gum at the same time. I go to bed pretty early and I’m with the kids and I don’t really go out that much – and it’s pretty much work or kids, work or kids… What the hell – but it’s definitely a two-man job. I’d like to have one more relationship in my life. I’ve always had great help and a great nanny but…”
She may be taking a quieter road – and a tough one – but the Leibovitz journey is far from over. “Beautiful, Annie. F***ing wicked,” Platon had barked at the end of our photo shoot. It’s hard not to agree.
1. The main points that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Annie Leibovitz:
a. is a famous photographer and mother.
b. only photographed celebrities.
c. even amongst scrutinization, remains true to herself as an artist.
d. has twin children, whom she incorporates into her photography often.
2. In the third paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “quips.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. A sharp sarcastic remark
b. A serious uttering
c. An innuendo
d. A sharp gesture with the hand
3. In the tenth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “austere.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. silly
b. beautiful
c. regal
d. severe
4. According to the author, what was Leibovitz’s most controversial image?
a. The image depicting a nude Demi Moore
b. The image depicting Susan Sontag’s death
c. The image depicting her father’s death
d. The image depicting John Cleese dangling from a tree
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