Leibovitz is not the first photographer to have featured her family on museum walls, but those who have done it well succeed largely because, though personal, their work seemed a seamless extension of their other professional endeavors behind the lens. Though peopled by friends and relatives, transcendent family photographs are not just the records of a clan, but also proof of the magic that sometimes happens in an artist's world, when everyday life merges with inspiration.
In 1950s Chicago, Harry Callahan humanized images that might otherwise have seemed coldly formal by including his wife, Eleanor, and daughter Barbara in his spare landscapes of street and sea. Forty years later, Sally Mann's infamous series "Immediate Family" shook up audiences by putting a dark, suggestive spin on the traditional snapshot. Mann's images, like miniature gothic dramas, depicted her three young children in various states of costume, undress, injury and play inside the family's community in rural southwestern Virginia. [Full disclosure: My admiration for Mann is genuine, but I'm not entirely impartial, having once worked as her assistant.] Mann called her subjects "ordinary things every mother has seen," but unlike the slapdash snapshots Leibovitz gives us, filtered through a view camera, even Mann's most mundane scenes took on allegorical weight; each bit of the detritus of domestic life is transformed into a haunting tableau of maternal love and wonder and innocence lost. The true nature of those moments may have belonged only to Mann and her family, but the mysteries they suggested resonated with anyone who has ever been a parent or a child.
Leibovitz is certainly aware of her predecessors; indeed their influence haunts "A Photographer's Life." The most striking allusion is to the work of Leibovitz's admitted hero Richard Avedon -- and never is it more obvious than in Leibovitz's morbid portraits of Sontag and her dying father. Just as Avedon's pictures of his ailing dad were condemned as exploitative and uncaring, today's critics have scolded Leibovitz's decision to include such unsparing images of Sontag -- photos that, even by Leibovitz's own admission, the notoriously vain Sontag would never have wanted made public. Does that make her choice a betrayal? It would be easier to forgive Leibovitz if the pictures lived up to her iconic reputation. But while shocking in their candor, and no doubt heartfelt, as composed images -- as art -- they fall flat.
It was precisely that visual exactitude that instilled in Avedon's portraits of his father a virtue lacking in Leibovitz's images of the dying Sontag. Avedon's death series was redeemed by his ability to metamorphose pictures of his invalid father into classic "Avedon portraits" -- as penetrating and graphic and arresting as any one of the shots he snapped for the New Yorker or Vogue. They were images of mortality and decay filtered through a precise aesthetic prism -- and further example of the way that when the conditions are right, a photographer can make personal work that is also a perfect synthesis of the everyday and the artful, the amateur and the professional. So perhaps it's no surprise that in "A Photographer's Life," Leibovitz's best family photos are those that are most like her assignment work. In a few formal, simple, straightforward portraits of Sontag and the photographer's parents, posed in Leibovitz's studio or outdoors in the open air -- in which the sitters look attractive and well-lighted and self-aware -- there is a flash of recognition, a sense both of who the person is in front of the camera and behind it. "It doesn't necessarily get easier to photograph someone the more you know them," Leibovitz said to the crowd at her opening -- a simple insight that was immensely revealing. Indeed, intimacy is not Leibovitz's forte; if anything, it is willful and cooperative artifice. All too happy to indulge their sitter's vanity, those few family pictures may not have the messy, edgy "authenticity" of the other snapshots, but they are somehow more personal, more heartfelt nonetheless. They are half-truths told with good intentions -- and isn't there a kind of love in that?
The great appeal of the snapshot has always been its power to provide a world out of context and beyond time. Specters of a suspended moment, they allow all of us to return endlessly to a past that we've lost -- one in which children never grow, wives never wrinkle, parents never die. Photographs are the life we carry with us once the real one gets roughed up by time's failing synapses. They are our visual diaries, exquisitely personal, practically unmediated. And like diaries, they are meant for private consumption.
There is a passing moment in Leibovitz's introduction when she admits that, in their years together, Sontag always chided her for not taking enough photos while off the clock. Before she died, Sontag wanted personal pictures, snapshots -- she wanted memories. Hearing that admission, it's not hard to see the family photos in "A Photographer's Life" as a workaholic's belated rebuttal to her lover's challenge. Messy and makeshift, the pictures -- the whole show, rather -- is a defiant, and perhaps a little deluded, announcement to Sontag, and her audience, but, most of all, to herself, that she did not let her own life go unseen.
About the writer
Sarah Karnasiewicz is an associate editor at Salon.
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