Annie Leibovitz: Nothing left to hide
Nov 06, 2008 By Cathy Galvin, Platon
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Annie Leibovitz is marching towards destiny with a giant stride - and today it's her fate to be photographed for this magazine. It's not a thing she welcomes. The most famous female portrait photographer in the world is about to be scrutinised by one of the trendiest. She knows he'll be focusing on every line in her 59-year-old face - "But I don't want to be an asshole about it," she says. So instead she's encouraging me to keep up as we bounce from her offices to a nearby studio in Greenwich Village, New York.
Awaiting her is the diminutive Platon: dynamic young photographers love a bold brand name. She's nervous, muttering: "What do I call him? Plat?" We're crushed into what appears to be a large black box with just enough room for Leibovitz and her assistants, Chad and Kathryn, Platon and his team of three, and some scorching lights. I'm on the floor, watching Little Platon and Big Annie, him at her knees in every sense as he stares up at her. "Couldn't you get a ditch dug in your studio?" she quips as he pleads for her to keep still. He adores her but he seems to adore everyone, and I know she's clocked that. His technique is to hunker down and shoot up at his subjects, a plankton's perspective on the world. "The smallest movements, Annie, the smallest movements," he begs.
Leibovitz is a challenge. For any woman, such close examination is agonising, but the pain is even greater for someone who lives their life behind, not in front of, the lens. She's gripping her camera for support, determined to make her face and body obey him, but her booming voice rebels: "Kathryn. Where's Kathryn? Can we have some good music here? I'm going crazy. Have you got some Springsteen? Some early Dylan? Some Emmylou?"
He wants her to look down, but every atom in her body is exploding with an instinctive aversion to that instruction. Her iconic status in the photographic pantheon is based on stamina, 35 years of consistent and often brilliant work, not neurosis. We may like our heroines to have a touch of the tragic about them, but she's having none of it. "I do not want to look sad," she tells me later, though in the moment she wants to help. At one point she can't contain herself any longer, grabs a camera and shoots back at him.
He tries to chat, to warm her up - not something she has much time for. She's written: "I don't like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me." When he questions her about her mother, she patiently explains that she died not too long ago. So, as it happens, did her father and her lover, the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag. When he asks, in the same way he once apparently asked President Bill Clinton, to "give him love", she roars with laughter. All the while, she's giving him a masterclass. The key to success, she says, is to go back: "Don't think that you've got it from one sitting. If you don't like what you see, go back. I do it all the time. Build relationships. It has to be intimate."
None of it, she's suggesting - the body of work, the attention, the reputation - comes in a moment. And none of it necessarily reveals the soul of the sitter or the photographer. She sees what she does as a series of one-dimensional fragments in a complex world. "What is reality anyway?" she asks me.
It's a good question, and one that has a particular bearing on the flood of celebrity portraits she's been shooting for magazines and advertising campaigns since the 1980s, photographs that helped define a particular era. When her cover shot of Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, appeared in 1991, some outlets displayed it in a white wrapper. There were howls of protest, followed by applause for her daring feminist take on female nudity, none of which she had intended. She simply loved the picture.
The range of her portraiture is breathtaking: from her trademark Hollywood group shots, as lavish as any film set, to quirky conceptual pieces - Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk or John Cleese dangling from a tree - to her elegant black-and-white portraits of dancers, writers and musicians. The Queen, according to the BBC, stormed out of a session with Leibovitz at Buckingham Palace last year. In fact, she was storming in. And they're all at it -Hollywood stars, international politicians, big corporates and magazines, all rushing towards her, ready to fly her anywhere, pay her anything, in the hope she will immortalise them. It's formidable work, and the familiarity of it can breed contempt. The photographic critic Vicki Goldberg once said Leibovitz had captured a culture, "and what a shabby culture it is". Leibovitz is aware of that tension: selling a cover has little to do with truth or art.
What's real for Leibovitz comes in the shape of three-year-old twins, Susan and Samuelle, angelic girls in a halo of blonde curls who are playing at dressing up in their bedroom at the top of a fairy-tale brownstone house. They're at the centre of a personal reappraisal of her life and work. She wants to snatch a few moments with them before I skitter after her to the dreaded photoshoot. When I ask how many people there are in Team Leibovitz, from studio, personal and photographic assistants to housekeepers and nannies, she laughs. She laughs a great deal, despite the austere appearance. There's no definitive answer because she's absorbed in tickling Samuelle, and I get drawn in to the play, but it's a significant number. There's a business, two homes - one here at the heart of New York and a 200-acre estate at Rhinebeck, near the Hudson river - to run with her staff. You notice the portraits around the house, because they aren't by Leibovitz. "I've got enough pictures of the children. I want to be with them, not photograph them," she says. Scattered about are snapshots of some of the wider Leibovitz clan, many in sepia. She's collating their family past and saving it for her children and five siblings.
At around the age of 50, Leibovitz made the bold, unconventional and life-changing decision to have children. It was her choice to be a single mother, not one that involved Sontag assuming the role of second parent. She doesn't discuss it. Her first child, Sarah, was born in October 2001, reportedly by sperm donor, when she was 51; the twins arrived by surrogate birth 3½ years later.
The other reality for Leibovitz is contained within the vast range of her photography over a lifetime: her love affair with reportage, not studio, photography. It's work that can still astonish. At her best, her journalistic instinct is acute. It was this that allowed her to take the remarkable photograph of a naked John Lennon coiled against the clothed figure of Yoko Ono just hours before he was killed in December 1980; to virtually live with the Rolling Stones and shoot some of the most memorable reportage of the 1970s. From the moment she left the San Francisco Art Institute and student photography to pursue a dizzying magazine career with the embryonic Rolling Stone magazine, hitting the road with the writers Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe and establishing herself as the leading music photographer of the time, she felt guilt that her photography wasn't art: "But that's the thing that drives the work, that tension between selling out and not selling out, doing it or not doing it, and I still maintain magazines are interesting vehicles for doing it. Sometimes you get squashed and then sometimes you just break through and you get to do something that's a complete surprise."
This month, a retrospective of her work, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, drawn from photographs that appeared in a book of the same name in 2006, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition celebrates her personal story: hanging with memorable portraits of celebrity and power are gentler images that capture those moments when supercharged Leibovitz has stood still. There are surprises: landscapes, family photographs, erotic memories, even some war images, the private collection of a very public figure, at times disturbingly intimate.
It's an account of the years 1990 to 2005, the years she spent with Susan Sontag, before both Sontag and her father died - Sontag in December 2004 and her father, Samuel, in early February the following year. The project began when she started to sift through undeveloped film and other personal images to find images of Sontag for her memorial service. She dismisses the idea those years were intense: "Yes of course, but everyone has this. We're going to have babies and we're going to die. This is everyman's story."
Yes and no. That collision of life and death in her middle years has changed Leibovitz's work. It's softer in the sense of being more revealing, yet carries the distinctive toughness of her journalistic instinct. Not everyone could reveal their own experiences of mortality in this way, or the experience of their loved ones.
In addition to the book and soon-to-open exhibition, another book called Annie Leibovitz at Work, aimed at answering every question that a young photographer might want to ask her, is published this month. All this retrospective introspection marks her awareness of her legacy: the story she will be leaving behind for her fans, her family, for history. What will she be remembered for - her shots of Demi Moore naked, or those that appeared in A Photographer's Life of her father and Susan Sontag dead? Or something else entirely - other work still to be published?
Few who see the exhibition will fail to be impressed by Leibovitz's scale and range; some will argue about whether a magazine photographer's output can be of lasting quality. She's unsure what the verdict will be on her life and work. "I remember meeting [the legendary US photographer] Ansel Adams in his late seventies, and they had him in his dark room - he only came out for five minutes - working on his master set. He did a whole series of master sets, and it's interesting to think along those lines… The thing that holds up, the thing that is remarkable, that I can stand outside of myself and look at and feel so lucky, is that it's all getting more interesting."
There are also regrets. She swings between confidence in her achievements and a rawness that shows it's too soon to have recovered from her losses. For all the pleasure in showing her family pictures, she knows that she and others have paid a price.
Did any of the family try to stop her showing their private moments; their struggle to cope with her father's death and his death-bed scene? "My mom. I showed my mom the book and she was worried about pictures of my dad and then she let it go. When I look back now, I wouldn't do what I did then. In Paris [the exhibition was held there this summer] when I was walking through the show, oh my gosh, I realised I'd left my family so vulnerable. God knows why you do it, on some level, but it came out of these moments and I won't do it again. I won't touch my family again. I have great respect for that moment - you know it was crazed and sad and vulnerable, and it's probably my best work." Visitors to the exhibition will find themselves drawn to a small black-and-white photograph that carries a heavy weight of bitterness, the most controversial she has taken. It shows the body of Susan Sontag laid out in a funeral home, her once beautiful, distinctive face almost unrecognisable, racked by the struggle to beat a virulent form of blood cancer. Leibovitz acknowledges: "There are good deaths and bad deaths. And Susan's was a bad death." The image spares the viewer nothing.
Earlier this year, I had interviewed Sontag's son, the writer David Rieff, who has written an anguished account of his mother's death and is now editing her journals and letters. When I tell her this, it throws her. She's known for checking out her interviewers, and has earlier told me how many children I have and listed some of the more inane projects I've worked on as proof of her investigative powers, but this detail had escaped her. She asks her assistant, Karen, to bring her the article, and reads it in front of me. In it, Rieff makes plain his contempt for Leibovitz - not for taking the photograph, but for showing it in her book and exhibition. "I think she had a choice. But for whatever purposes it served in her psyche or her career, there was no way I could stop her," he had said.
It's clear the two of them were uncomfortable with each other while Sontag was alive, and Leibovitz comments on their capacity to have made each other miserable after Sontag's death. Rieff called Leibovitz Sontag's "on-again, off-again lover", while friends of Leibovitz recall the abruptness of Rieff's behaviour in death, failing to acknowledge the love and support Leibovitz had offered his mother during her life. She had renovated a cottage for Sontag on her estate, had bought both of them a home at the Quai des Grands-Augustins in Paris; and had chartered planes to take Sontag to hospital for a bone-marrow transplant and later back to New York.
Recovering herself, Leibovitz says: "I showed the book to everyone I was worried about before it was published - with the exception of David Rieff. Most of those people were close to Susan, like Joan Didion and Susan's sister, Judith. The most important person I showed it to was Andrew Wylie [Sontag's agent], who knows David and was executor of Susan's estate, and he was very supportive and said leave David to me and I'll talk to him."
She says of Rieff's book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, which charts his mother's final months: "I thought it was terrible. Only because it was so cold. But if you notice, nobody else was there in David's book except David."
But was she there for Susan's final moments? "I wasn't there. It was the first death that I ever experienced. Would I do it differently now? I certainly would. But at the time even David was going away, and my father was dying. I had this trip to Florida to see him, and I was taking my Christmas vacation and splitting it between Susan and my father… so I was with Susan up until that Sunday, and she said I love you and I said goodbye, and I left and felt sure she'd be fine for a few days. Then I got down to Florida and had literally just landed, and David called me and said there was a turn for the worse. I tried to get on a plane to get back, and there wasn't a plane until the morning. She died when I was in the plane. "I begged him to keep her there until I saw her, and he did. In retrospect, David was desperately trying to hold on to his mother in some way, and of course pushed everyone else away - and it was painful to a lot of people. He had a lot to deal with."
Has she questioned her decision to keep the picture of Sontag in the funeral home in the exhibition? In her book, Leibovitz admits she was in a trance when she took the picture, and had provided Sontag's funeral clothes: a dress they had bought in Milan, scarves from Venice, a favourite black velvet coat she liked to wear to the theatre. "No, I think it is a strong picture. I have absolutely no problem about it. I think there's a genre to it and I'm a photographer and I feel like it was totally appropriate." She wouldn't release the picture for publication here.
We can't know what Sontag would have thought. She loved photography, wrote eloquently about its cultural impact and there's something prescient about one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), an analysis of how horrific images can make voyeurs of us all. Sontag had encouraged Leibovitz to broaden her work, and the two had travelled together twice to Sarajevo during the Serbian siege. In her book, Sontag notes: "People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them." She also wrote: "Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed."
Leibovitz continues: "I went down to the funeral home and I did it. I think David is quoted as saying it was some kind of circus-like picture. I shot it with a digital camera, and I got home and the printing machine had run out of ink, and it came out this kind of strange green, which I thought was interesting at the time… it just happened." Those painful green images make a spread in the book.
She doesn't attempt to present either the book or the exhibition as a kind of truth: it is, she says, a moment: "You see things in the work. You can start to create fictions some time. That's all right. The whole thing is a kind of fiction. We made up a story for you to see… there's just enough pictures to tell a story."
And what drives Annie's own story? The sense of never stopping for breath? It began young, the patterns established in childhood. Anna-Lou Leibovitz has been on the move since the day she was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1949. Her father was in the air force, and the family - she was lost in the middle of five siblings - were used to being bundled in the car and transported from base to base, the classic American road story. They never stayed anywhere long. There were fights between them all: "I think the fact that we were on the move saved us. It kept us together, and it's interesting because I'm thinking now what it must be like for my kids growing up in one spot; because for us, for good or bad, the fact we were moving every couple of years, it solved all our problems. I never even knew you saw people again. That made us closer, because your siblings became your best friends and you travelled together. I do see a parallel with taking pictures - you go in for a quick study and you get out."
Leibovitz was the third child in an exuberant, physical family. Their vitality, and her love of them, bursts out of the photographs on display in the book and exhibition: strong father and brother; a mother who had been a dancer. None of them afraid of the camera. "There were kind of two halves. I had an older brother I was enamoured with, and an older sister who was a bit too old for me… so I was the youngest of the oldest set and the oldest of the younger set.
"When I got older, I felt like I was totally abandoned. I was left to my own devices pretty much. And by the time I was older my mom was too pooped to do too much with me.
"If you talk to my siblings, they just can't sit down. I think there's something chemically wrong with us all! We all have this kind of workaholism - I think they've now labelled it attention deficit disorder. I'm sure there's something in that."
Others have observed her inability to settle, including Susan Sontag, whom she met in 1988. "She said I was always passing through." Another kind of speed caught up with her in the 1970s, when she became briefly addicted to drugs. "Cocaine propelled you. It kept you believing you were thinking," she has said.
I suggest she thrives on being at the calm centre of chaos, but she says the rush is over: "When I had the children, I finally hit the wall. Okay, it just seemed like you were going and going and going - and then you had the children and you are finally filled up. It takes care of every single thing that you have, even to the point that you realise you have too much to do, and you try to figure out how to manage that the best you can."
It's unstated but evident that Leibovitz worries her children may be left without her before they are grown up. "I feel like a summer-camp director. Having a family, especially being a single mother, having the sense of family for my children is so important, so that they understand there's this extended family.
You know, I probably work to see my siblings more than I would - just so my children understand they are not alone, that they have a bigger family. With my parents gone [her mother died last year], I thought I'd maybe have a break from my brothers and sisters for a while - but on the contrary, we kind of closed rank." She spends August at Rhinebeck with the children and an assortment of her siblings, nephews and nieces. At an age when others consider stepping off the treadmill, Leibovitz is flirting with the idea of slowing down - a little. She may work a four-day week from July.
The feminist writer Gloria Steinem once said of Leibovitz that she was the most authoritative, uncertain person she knew. It's easy to see why, particularly at this point in her life: "You absolutely continue to question what you've done. It's an interesting time. I was very pleased when A Photographer's Life was published: I'd been trying to express that work for so long, and it has emotional impact. You get that opportunity in your lifetime - where you know that you really did do art; though you really didn't know what you did until you'd done it."
Now she wants to make time for more projects close to her heart. "Because of the children, I have a cause. I have to question myself about whether I am doing what I want to do or should be doing, and I'm trying to sort it out." Meanwhile, the jobs roll in, including presidential candidate Barack Obama for Men's Vogue, though she recently said no to his running mate, Joe Biden, because she wants to work fewer weekends. The Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would, however, be irresistible.
Who makes her laugh? She roars. Pointing at her facial muscles she says: "These muscles are so underused… I'm not kidding! There are those people who never smile and they just get that look? And then when I had the children - my Samuelle is like my own little Lindsay Lohan, a little troublemaker: if she can put her finger in a socket, she'll do it. But you have to admire her. It's funny how they come out of the box like that.
"I have to say right now I haven't quite figured out how to walk and chew gum at the same time. I go to bed pretty early and I'm with the kids and I don't really go out that much - and it's pretty much work or kids, work or kids… What the hell - but it's definitely a two-man job. I'd like to have one more relationship in my life. I've always had great help and a great nanny but…"
She may be taking a quieter road - and a tough one - but the Leibovitz journey is far from over. "Beautiful, Annie. F***ing wicked," Platon had barked at the end of our photo shoot. It's hard not to agree.
[From The Sunday Times] |
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