Photographs are an “inventory of mortality,” Susan Sontag wrote in “On Photography.” They “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.” It is Sontag’s own mortality that haunts the new book by Annie Leibovitz, her friend and companion of some 15 years. A PHOTOGRAPHER’S LIFE, 1990-2005 (Random House, $75), which contains more than 300 photographs, is also about a writer’s death. The many pictures of Sontag — living and dying — are arresting, the kind of pictures that make you want to ask the photographer what she was thinking, what she was feeling, why she took out her camera. “I forced myself to take pictures of Susan’s last days,” Leibovitz says in an introduction, as if by way of answer. “I didn’t analyze it then. I just knew I had to do it.”
Susan Sontag in Paris, December 2003. CreditBook Photograph by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
These photographs are intensely personal in other ways, too. They chronicle the death of Leibovitz’s father early in 2005, six weeks after Sontag’s, and include images of the photographer herself (among them, the cover shots taken by Sontag) naked, and pregnant with her first child; in a series of seemingly impromptu self-portraits; and with her extended family for Thanksgiving. These, along with shots of birthdays, burials and days at the beach, are scattered among the trademark celebrity portraits that have made Leibovitz, 57, a celebrity in her own right and that dominated her much less personal first retrospective collection, covering 1970-90.
These photographs are intensely personal in other ways, too. They chronicle the death of Leibovitz’s father early in 2005, six weeks after Sontag’s, and include images of the photographer herself (among them, the cover shots taken by Sontag) naked, and pregnant with her first child; in a series of seemingly impromptu self-portraits; and with her extended family for Thanksgiving. These, along with shots of birthdays, burials and days at the beach, are scattered among the trademark celebrity portraits that have made Leibovitz, 57, a celebrity in her own right and that dominated her much less personal first retrospective collection, covering 1970-90.
William S. Burroughs in 1995. CreditBook Photograph by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Perhaps the most striking figure here besides Sontag is Leibovitz’s mother, who leaps from the pages like the dancer she might have been had she not raised six children. She is so vital, at least in the first three-quarters of the book, she almost seems to belong among the photographs of athletes like Gwen Torrence, Carl Lewis and Charles Austin, as she dances at the ocean’s edge with a grandchild or works in the kitchen on her 75th birthday wearing only her swimsuit. But then she grows frail before our eyes, as Sontag grows ill, as Leibovitz’s father declines, as her first daughter is born and grows older, as the current crop of movie stars — among them Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Jamie Foxx, Scarlett Johansson — appear, for now, ageless.
Yet a look at Leibovitz’s earlier retrospective belies the apparent immortality of the celebrity: many of her subjects from that book are gone — Jerry Garcia, Louis Armstrong, Hunter S. Thompson, Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and most memorably John Lennon, pictured with his naked body curled around Yoko Ono. She revisits still others in the new book, where they seem to be aging with grace (or, in a few cases, barely at all): Arnold Schwarzenegger, then (1976 and 1988) with muscles bursting out all over his body, and now (1997) an Adonis on skis, not quite as bulging, but almost as smooth-faced; Bruce Springsteen, then (1984) guitar in hand as if in midflight in front of the American flag for his “Born in the U.S.A.” poster, and now (1999), guitar on his knee, looking less the boy and more the Boss; and the Rolling Stones, to whom the conventions of aging apparently do not apply.
There is an unsettling effect in mixing the public figure with the personal, the flattering and posed with the unadorned, the grainy with the piercing sharpness of the studio (“a photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen,” Sontag wrote). The family members become celebrities, but the celebrities seem emotionally empty after the charged images of the people Leibovitz loves in happy times, images that portend later illnesses and grief. “I considered doing a book made up completely of personal work,” Leibovitz says, “and concluded that the personal work on its own wasn’t a true view of the last 15 years. I don’t have two lives. This is one life.”
Perhaps the most striking figure here besides Sontag is Leibovitz’s mother, who leaps from the pages like the dancer she might have been had she not raised six children. She is so vital, at least in the first three-quarters of the book, she almost seems to belong among the photographs of athletes like Gwen Torrence, Carl Lewis and Charles Austin, as she dances at the ocean’s edge with a grandchild or works in the kitchen on her 75th birthday wearing only her swimsuit. But then she grows frail before our eyes, as Sontag grows ill, as Leibovitz’s father declines, as her first daughter is born and grows older, as the current crop of movie stars — among them Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Jamie Foxx, Scarlett Johansson — appear, for now, ageless.
Yet a look at Leibovitz’s earlier retrospective belies the apparent immortality of the celebrity: many of her subjects from that book are gone — Jerry Garcia, Louis Armstrong, Hunter S. Thompson, Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and most memorably John Lennon, pictured with his naked body curled around Yoko Ono. She revisits still others in the new book, where they seem to be aging with grace (or, in a few cases, barely at all): Arnold Schwarzenegger, then (1976 and 1988) with muscles bursting out all over his body, and now (1997) an Adonis on skis, not quite as bulging, but almost as smooth-faced; Bruce Springsteen, then (1984) guitar in hand as if in midflight in front of the American flag for his “Born in the U.S.A.” poster, and now (1999), guitar on his knee, looking less the boy and more the Boss; and the Rolling Stones, to whom the conventions of aging apparently do not apply.
There is an unsettling effect in mixing the public figure with the personal, the flattering and posed with the unadorned, the grainy with the piercing sharpness of the studio (“a photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen,” Sontag wrote). The family members become celebrities, but the celebrities seem emotionally empty after the charged images of the people Leibovitz loves in happy times, images that portend later illnesses and grief. “I considered doing a book made up completely of personal work,” Leibovitz says, “and concluded that the personal work on its own wasn’t a true view of the last 15 years. I don’t have two lives. This is one life.”
No comments:
Post a Comment