What Makes Annie Shoot?
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The Observatory
“I look back at it now,” Annie Leibovitz said at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1991, “I realize that one of the things I loved toward the end at Rolling Stone were the conceptual covers.” She had left for Vanity Fair in 1983, in part to follow an art director she admired. There she did little until Tina Brown arrived all bluster and balls in 1984—and then she did a lot.
Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s owner-operator, had become overly concerned about newsstand sales. “He wanted really clean, you know, head shots really. There was a study—they started to do studies, you know,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “And they came up with this study that the conceptual covers didn’t sell well because the person wasn’t recognizable. … For example, the Steve Martin photograph against the Franz Kline painting was the worst-selling cover that year.”
Annie Leibovitz had gotten too rock ’n’ roll for Rolling Stone.
That worst-selling cover—from February 1982—is a real mess, in today’s focus-group-in-a-Chicago-mall terms. Mr. Martin, in a suit, is painted with crude black stripes, and is in mid-campy-dance-step. The black-and-white painting looms beyond him. (Inside you might have learned that he would prefer not to discuss his relationship with Bernadette Peters.)
Then there was her Matt Dillon cover late that year. Mr. Dillon, pouty and incredibly young, is in slacks and shirt and tie, twisted and reclining, one leg up, thereby showing half his ass—and with his crotch placed nearly dead center on the magazine’s cover. What definitely seems to be Mr. Dillon’s extended middle finger rests near his square hairline. It was her last Rolling Stone cover. Now that’s how you say goodbye—to your magazine, your youth, whatever.
Ms. Leibovitz was, for much of the 80’s, an unusual bridge between the fine art world and the commercial world. This meant that in her practice she gathered commerce in one hand and journalism in the other.
Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz.
“‘Mr. President, wave!’ Annie suddenly called as they ambled toward the residence,” Tina Brown wrote in The Washington Post a few years back of the 1989 Vanity Fair shoot of Ron and Nancy Reagan.
Ms. Leibovitz had the two in Christmas-red cashmere sweaters.
Ms. Brown went on: “‘Whom are we waving at?’ Mrs. Reagan asked. ‘Congress, Nancy,’ said the president.”
It is hard to pinpoint the year and time in which Ms. Leibovitz’s balance collapsed, but it may very well have been 1989, and it may have been right there in the Rose Garden.
But there were so many other opportunities along her path between touring with the Rolling Stones in the mid-70’s to her show of portraits of women, called, handily, “Women.” I caught that one at the Corcoran in D.C., eight years ago.
The larger prints were actually split and mounted on two separate backings, with a vast seam running vertically down the middle. This wasn’t photography as museums know it. It was a collection of cheaply produced touring posters.
By 2003, she was subject to a brutal takedown by Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times. Among the kinder ideas expressed, she described Ms. Leibovitz as being “devoutly committed to portraiture while seeming remarkably uninterested in people.”
In 2006, she was untouched by an attack by Times art critic Roberta Smith, on the occasion of a Brooklyn Museum retrospective. It was a vicious amplification of Ms. Smith’s 1991 opinion of Ms. Leibovitz’s sort-of tautological problem: Her “images are only as interesting as the achievements or public persona of her subjects.”
Ms. Leibovitz was busy shooting Disney campaigns, American Express campaigns, Vogue campaigns, Gap campaigns—and who can forget all her work on behalf of those dairy pimps, the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, which had peaked early with the publication of 1998’s The Milk Mustache Book: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at America’s Favorite Advertising Campaign?
“The truth is, I thought I was doing journalism, but I really wasn’t,” Ms. Leibovitz told Powell’s Books in 1999. “When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that’s what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. What became important was to have a point of view.”
Around the same time, she told The Times: “There’s a lot of things that have taken over over the years that weren’t there when I started. They need to sell the magazine. … The cover probably feels more like advertising than anything else.”
“When Annie started at Rolling Stone, we had the time, the access, and most importantly, she had the love of the subject and the desire to do it,” said Mr. Wenner, backstabbingly, in a 2006 documentary made by Ms. Leibovitz’s younger sister. “She achieves a level of understanding and depth for these people that has only been repeated, really, in her personal photography.”
So he thought that all of her work-for-hire in the past quarter-century has been crap. She thought much the same of his magazine, clearly. But what difference has there really been in the covers she has shot for Condé Nast and the covers he has run at Rolling Stone?
Over the years she has revisited many of the same suspects repeatedly, and to her detriment. There is Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1976, nude from behind, while filming Pumping Iron—and sharing adjoined twin beds with another bulky man, crotch out. A dozen years later, she returned to him, and with the Reagan treatment out came that chilly portrait of him on horseback.
There is the incredible picture of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in Malibu in 1978. Her arms are crossed. (“You could go so far as to say I caught them or something, their personalities,” Ms. Liebovitz said, accurately, of that photo.) Then there is Ms. Didion alone in 2006, under a red-purple tree, one hand almost a claw at her own neck, gazing up and beyond the camera and connoting absolutely nothing.
There is Mikhail Baryshnikov on the beach in 1990—and then, in 2006, he is rappelling down or up a building, looking nothing so much like a Bruce Willis stand-in. And then again also as an incredibly old Peter Pan in one of the latest Disney campaigns.
“I actually don’t spend that much time with them anymore,” she said of her subjects—back in 1991. “I mean, when I was younger, I did, you know, I actually, their life seemed much more interesting than mine and I really lived inside the photographs. … It’s different now.”
While magazines became all index charts and lists—a heap of texticles—her body of work would come to include a Photoshop job of a baby bear joined with Leo DiCaprio.
The portraits became more conservative, more cold, more amenable to the company of pull quotes. Still she kept up a brutal pace of work. Why? She bought two buildings in the West Village, and when illegal work damaged a neighbor’s property, she just bought it up as well.
The photographer’s conservatism was displayed prominently in 1996, in Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corporation. An advertisement for a film had put Leslie Nielsen’s head on a pregnant woman’s body in direct imitation of Ms. Liebovitz’s classic 1991 Vanity Fair cover of a pregnant, naked Demi Moore.
Ms. Leibovitz believed this was copyright infringement; the studio maintained that it was protected parody; the court agreed; she appealed.
In Rogers v. Koons—which was also appealed to the 2nd Circuit, and just a few years prior—Jeff Koons had unsuccessfully defended himself against the charge of copying the work of another artist. He had made a sculpture, of two people holding eight puppies, in imitation of a photograph.
The 2nd Circuit affirmed the decision against Koons, saying that the copied photograph itself was not the object of mockery—while, in affirming a decision against Leibovitz, it said that "the ad may reasonably be perceived as commenting on the seriousness, even the pretentiousness, of the original."
What is funny about these two cases is that the decisions should have been reversed. (Also funny is that Leibovitz should never have been so curmudgeonly and self-serious to pursue that claim at all.)
What interest could Paramount conceivably have had in mounting a critique of the photograph? They had none—whereas Koons, taking on his source, certainly did.
Still, "pretentiousness" wasn't a quality that the Demi Moore photograph was intended to have, but apparently, at least in the eyes of the court, it did.
Because the photographs were often skin-deep—because she was shooting signs—the pictures of black people became often about blackness, just as one of her photographs of a battered woman became about that woman’s injuries. This is not a terrible thing. It’s not as if blackness weren’t also a concern of those photographed.
So there is Whoopi Goldberg in the bath of milk, Miles Davis in 1989 with his face obscured, Al Sharpton emasculated in the beauty parlor in 1998, all the black athletes looking like racehorses.
And there was LeBron James, on the cover of this April’s Vogue, hustling both a ball and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen in either an unlikely conscious homage to 75-year-old imagery of King Kong or in just, say, a randomly discovered, formally pleasing, overly lit and magazine-friendly arrangement of the human figures that so happened to have been negotiated for cover placement and that, among all the shots taken, tested best among women of a certain age bracket that had been recently gathered in some horrible room with no exterior windows in a mall.
It was hard, Ms. Leibovitz said after traveling to Sarajevo with her lover Susan Sontag, to return and spend her days wondering from which side she might best photograph Barbra Streisand. But she managed.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.
