Annie Leibovitz's reckless candor

The renowned photographer's snapshots of her partner Susan Sontag and of her family, exhibited for the first time, are shocking in their intimacy -- but they should have stayed inside that shoe box.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Read more: Photography, Susan Sontag, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features

Photo: AP/Mary Altaffer

Annie Leibovitz during the press preview for "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographers's Life, 1990-2005" Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006 at the Brooklyn Museum in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

Nov. 18, 2006 | Somewhere at the back of our closets, in shoe boxes or plastic bins, we all have stacks of these snapshots: pale thighs and juice boxes and striped umbrellas on a sandy beach; a rumpled bed and a view from an anonymous window; poses by the lake at a cousin's wedding, candids out of focus or ill-framed. Even as we shoot them, most are forgotten -- and as anyone who's suffered through someone else's endless slide show knows, that's usually for the best. Photographs are great hyperbolists, capable of convincing us that, with the simple push of a button, a mundane moment is something worth memorializing. Still, even the most obsessive shutterbugs usually know that the only people who care about these images are those who lived the captured moments or loved the people who did.

But when you're a professional photographer, courted by museums and celebrities -- indeed, a celebrity yourself -- and your images are splashed on glossy covers around the world, perhaps it's harder to know when to keep your shoe boxes sealed. That was what I concluded, anyway, upon viewing "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005," the much-heralded exhibition of Annie Leibovitz's work now on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The show, which is scheduled for a major international tour over the next year, and the accompanying coffee-table book, recently published by Random House, present an expansive and ambitious 15-year retrospective of the well-known photographer's work. Though replete with Leibovitz's signature Hollywood portraits and high-profile assignments for Vanity Fair and American Express, this exhibit breaks with the photographer's past shows by giving equal weight to both her famous commercial work and images drawn from Leibovitz's private collection of personal projects and snapshots. On one wall you find a sultry shot of Scarlett Johansson in sequins and leopard skin, on another a candid of Leibovitz's young daughter, Sarah, in her car seat and Halloween face paint.

The years covered by "A Photographer's Life" were tumultuous ones for Leibovitz, in which she not only traveled across continents on assignments and welcomed three children into the world, but also lost a parent and her longtime lover, the critic and novelist Susan Sontag, to cancer. If ever there was an antithesis to Leibovitz's airbrushed glamour shots, the images of Sontag are it, made during the last few days of her illness, and finally, after her death. Swollen and scarred, lying prostrate in her bed, Sontag suffers mightily in front of Leibovitz's lens, a reality that is especially hard to reconcile when one remembers how preening and proud Sontag could be in life.

One senses that in what was surely a time of great pain, Leibovitz took retreat in the role of photographer, or more precisely, in the purposefulness that can come from bearing witness. But conceived in conflict and stripped of the commercial artifice that usually cloaks her work, Leibovitz's Sontag images -- as well as some previously unseen journalistic work including shots taken in the bloody streets of Sarejevo -- suggest another kind of unseemly striving. These are Annie as artist, bared and raw. Grainy and gray, their vérité style studiously serious, the pictures insist: I did not look away. But diary or documentary, for whom were these records really meant?

There is a great distinction between a photographer who shoots pictures of her family in a snapshot aesthetic, and one who simply takes snapshots, just as there is a difference between a writer who composes a memoir and one who keeps a journal. While a diarist records the events of the day, a memoirist decisively narrates the story of a life, and in doing so creates meaning from what would otherwise be fragments. Somewhere in her photos' journey from the shoe box to the white gallery walls, Leibovitz would have been well served to consider frankly on what side of that line they fell. These images may have comforted her -- and they may draw a crowd by proffering a glimpse into the private world of a public personality -- but mere candidness is not enough to give them meaning.

Seeing her life's images laid before her, in all their multiplicity, was clearly cathartic for Leibovitz. "This show came out of a moment of grief ... discovering these images was like going on an archaeological dig," she told her audience at the exhibition opening. "The [family pictures] meant so much more to me than the assignment work in that moment." But if healing was her goal, why not let the pictures stay strung up on the walls of the barn in upstate New York where she edited the work -- and where she says she played Rosanne Cash's CD "Black Cadillac"at full volume and cried for a month?

Instead, she has offered them up to the public, so it seems safe to assume Leibovitz's aspirations are something closer to art. In the introduction to her book, she explains, "I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it." As a conceit, that rationale may add up, but its implications are vexing nonetheless. Whether one is a photographer, a journalist or an accountant, the border between our professional and personal selves is one that requires constant navigation. All of us have just "one life." Leibovitz may be an accomplished image-maker, but the context of professional accomplishments hardly seems enough to transform her otherwise ordinary snapshots into art.

"A Photographer's Life" engages the mind only as it confuses. It's impossible to walk through the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum -- or thumb through the widely available catalog from the show -- without asking oneself why Leibovitz included four pictures of her parents in their cluttered Florida kitchen, her father seated at the table looking down, and her mother, square and barefooted in a bathing suit, standing with her face to the stove? Leibovitz says that she designed the four-image series, just one of many that pepper the exhibit and the book, because the "flow of images" is more true to real life than a singular shot. But to the skeptical observer, the series format just seems like a crutch -- an attempt to give a sense of weightiness to work too weak to stand on its own.

In grainy black-and-white, and printed at a much smaller scale than the celebrity pictures, they make odd little neighbors to George W. Bush and Brad Pitt. Her commercial work is crisp and confident -- the sense of composition flawless, her colors saturated, figures practically gilded. Indeed, the singular gift of Leibovitz's lens has always been to magnify whatever bright light was before it, whether an Olympic swimmer, a Hollywood socialite or a head of state. But the selections from her personal trove feel plagued by indecision. Take one of these shots and stick it in your own amateur album, and you'd flip past it without missing a beat.

Next page: Sontag always chided her for not taking enough photos while off the clock