A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005
Annie Leibovitz
Random House, New York
2006, $75.00, pp. 472

A Book With a View

Mandy Katz

Most bookstore patrons will open Annie Leibovitz’s lush new collection of recent photographs at the middle and flip randomly through the highly stylized magazine portraits that have made Leibovitz famous—Johnny Cash and family harmonizing on their porch, Baryshnikov on the beach, model Cindy Crawford wearing nothing but a snake. Browsers may pause at the book’s less celebrated family studies and even stop to peruse the artist’s surprisingly personal essay at the front.

But to truly see the world through Leibovitz’s eyes, those lucky enough to lug this sizeable book home would do well to start with its first photograph, taken at Petra, Jordan, and then turn to its closing image, of Monument Valley, Arizona.With these two photos, Leibovitz literally book-ends the “life” referred to in her title, A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005.

In Petra, her camera finds a sliver of light between the walls of a massive crevasse. Through this opening, we see a carved stone façade—natural grandeur meeting its man-made counterpart. A textbook study in the artful use of negative space, the composition offers a lesson in perspective, too: Leibovitz has centered the shot on a minute human figure at the cave entrance, silhouetted in the brilliant light beyond.
That figure, poised at the composition’s vanishing point, is barely recognizable as Leibovitz’s late companion, writer Susan Sontag. Leibovitz originally placed her there, she recalls in her introduction, “to give a sense of scale to the scene.” Since Sontag’s death from cancer in 2004, however, she sees more there. “In retrospect, the photograph is also about the smallness of individual life. And since the façade is covered in funerary symbols, and since it was probably used as a tomb or a mausoleum, the picture sounds the themes of death and grief that wind through the book.”

This ambitious collection, in other words, illustrates not so much the straightforward “photographer’s life” of Annie Leibovitz—as a sought-after celebrity portraitist, devoted daughter and sister, late-blooming mother (she gave birth to her first child at age 51) or as Sontag’s earnest lover and admirer. Rather, the book plumbs the photographer’s understanding of life—and death—and the arcs of those lives entwined with hers.

Photos of superstars will sell this book, offering eye candy and glamour in vivid color, while Leibovitz’s fresh landscapes show the promise of a new direction in her career. But it is the understated black-and-white pictures of the private lives around her, taken on Tri-X film with an old-fashioned 35-millimeter Leica, that give the book a compelling narrative and its reason for being. Even readers who buy Vanity Fair or Vogue for the 57-year-old Leibovitz’s slick set pieces—quirky, inventive tableaux like actress Scarlett Johansson as a cheesecake pinup and black comedian Chris Rock in white face—will find themselves drawn to her family chronicle.

Leibovitz captures reunions, sometimes boisterous, sometimes sad, among three generations of her family. We see her spirited, wrinkled parents swimming, cavorting with grandchildren, and mugging companionably for the camera. Silly, almost surreal shots of Sontag and friends dressed as fuzzy bears one New Year’s Eve give rise to playful musing about what Leibovitz herself might have been wearing as she photographed them. A panoramic layout reveals her parents’ dining room packed with kin on her mother’s 80th birthday. And, in one of the book’s only personal photos taken in color, the author literally turns her camera on a trio of children buckled into a minivan’s rear seats, their faces painted and sticky treats in hand.

These scenes of haimish family occasions gradually cede to more emotionally difficult moment/images. Leibovitz’s brother bends to press his cheek against their weakened father’s forehead, gingerly avoiding his oxygen tube. Their mother’s legs, sprawled awkwardly across her husband’s lap, close the circle both visually and emotionally. A montage of Sontag at her sickest, distended by illness and medicine, gives way just a few pages later to the joyful, messy sight of the photographer’s slimy twins—squalling, legs akimbo—in the hospital delivery room.
While birthing pictures began gaining cultural acceptance as far back as the 1970s, Leibovitz’s raw, deeply physical portraits of sickness and death can still shock. In interviews, she says she agonized over the propriety of including them but ultimately concluded that these, too, reflect the “life” of her title. Sontag, Leibovitz says, would have agreed. If an overtly Jewish outlook emerges anywhere in the work, it is in this preoccupation with the earthy parts of human lives, including their messy beginnings and ends. But, while Sontag was a highly public—albeit nonobservant—Jew, Leibovitz’s self-image centers more on her upbringing in a large, close-knit clan of Air Force brats than on ethnic or religious identity.
Whatever their psychological origins, the author’s bedside and bier-side moment/images clearly speak to her aesthetic fascination with shapes and corporeality. In Leibovitz’s oeuvre, the sculpted curves and shadows of athlete Carl Lewis’s body echo in a similarly sensuous shot of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The life-giving curves of pregnant bodies (her own and, famously, that of actress Demi Moore on a Vanity Fair cover) are of a piece with the rumpled geometry of Sontag’s clothed body sprawled across a bed as she naps.

Even at her father’s burial, Leibovitz and her camera continue to seek out this shapeliness in the world. Achingly candid shots of family at the graveside lead to an examination of the dirt-covered coffin itself, an elegant composition of rectangles within rectangles. Turn the page, and relief arrives in the form of a peaceful, tactile portrait of fist-sized river rocks—from a collection of Sontag’s shot long before her death. Leibovitz thus permits the reader to join her in placing the proverbial pebble on the headstones of her loved ones.

In the collection’s final offering, the awkward, craggy spire of a butte rises from a swirling gray landscape.The completely blank, white sky around it strikes a ghostly counterpoint—literally a negative image—to the sinuous cave entrance that opened the book.

We have traveled with the photographer from Sontag’s frozen moment at Petra—at the threshold between darkness and light, nature and culture—back to Earth at her wildest and what might be most primeval. Annie Leibovitz has brought us full circle.