| November 27th, 2005 07:46 AM |
|
|
| Ten Thousand Motels |
Annie Leibovitz: Significant Photographer Of Celebrities
By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
& ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published on 11/27/2005
Some people know how to look good in a photograph. Some do not.
Annie Leibovitz makes them all look good: Whoopi Goldberg grinning in a warm milk bath, Demi Moore nude and pregnant, Susan Sontag with skunk-striped hair, shirtless Jerzy Kosinski in riding boots, Bette Midler in roses, Keith Haring in nothing but his own graffiti, Steve Martin painted up like a Franz Kline, Miles Davis fingering his tongue, Keith Richards passed out, Clint Eastwood bound like a steer, Meryl Streep pulling her rubbery white face, Hillary Clinton queenly in red, Sting nude, Divine in a bra.
You never have to wonder about the significance of a Leibovitz portrait. It's right there on the surface.
She always manages to choose a setting, a pose and a costume that will puzzle no one. That may be why, for many celebrities, the Leibovitz photograph is the photograph, the one that will follow them to the grave.
Leibovitz's most famous portrait shows a nude John Lennon clinging to a clothed Yoko Ono, hanging on for dear life. It was, as Leibovitz once noted, “definitely an image I saw before I took the photograph.”
Lennon liked it. “That's us,” he told her when he looked at the Polaroid. “That's our relationship.” He was killed hours later.
Leibovitz, born in 1949 in Waterbury, to Samuel Leibovitz, an Air Force colonel, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor, studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 1969, while living on a kibbutz in Israel, she got a subscription to Rolling Stone from her boyfriend. She remembers thinking, “If I could just work for this magazine. ...” She could, and did, from 1970 to 1983, evolving from a photographer of celebrities to a plain old celebrity herself.
Her first assignment was to photograph Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane's lead singer. Back then, she tells Smithsonian magazine, “I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me, that I wasn't to alter it or tamper with it.”
The photographers to copy were Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She did not copy. Instead, she learned how to be totally subjective, first in black and white and later in saturated color. Her bold, highly staged pictures were shaped by their goal — to stand out on the cover of a magazine. But her eye never got weird or mean.
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people,” she once said.
Leibovitz has often let her subjects call the shots. Louis Armstrong, knob-kneed in shorts, socks and slippers, got to leave the TV, and the ball game, on. Diane Keaton pulled a white turtleneck up over her face because she didn't like the camera.
But somehow Leibovitz also has gotten her way. Performance artist Karen Finley wanted to preserve her nudity for the stage; Leibovitz wanted to preserve it for posterity. Leibovitz won.
For the camera, Leibovitz has coaxed so many men out of their shirts that Tom Wolfe, whom she has photographed in tie, jacket and hankie, once mused: “Why are so many celebrities willing, even desperate, to take their shirts off for the photographer?” Maybe it's because they trust her.
In 1983, Leibovitz had her first solo exhibition, published her first book and left Rolling Stone to become Vanity Fair's first contributing photographer. She didn't worry about competing with the grand men of fashion photography: Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. “I had to find my own form of glamour,” she said.
Never far from commercial, she went all out in 1987 for an American Express ad campaign, offering up some of her finest subjects: Ella Fitzgerald in red next to her 1959 Mercedes convertible, Sammy Davis Jr. dancing in the desert, Tip O'Neill in a beach chair, bare-chested Arnold Schwarzenegger on a white stallion. Her artistic reputation did not suffer.
In 1991 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the International Center of Photography, in New York City, gave her a museum show.
The secret of Leibovitz's success may be her devotion to photography as theater and her deep belief in the truth of appearances.
“Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface,” she has said, “because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.”
|
| November 27th, 2005 09:46 PM |
|
|
| glencar |
She & Sontag were a couple for the last decade of Sontag's life. |
| November 27th, 2005 11:09 PM |
|
|
| corgi37 |
Her 75 tour pix are stunning. |
|
