Celebrity contamination and quieter talents
Posted: 09 Feb 2012 | By: Patricia Anderson - Editor
Annie Leibovitz’s expansive show opened in Sydney this year to considerable fanfare and everyone, from the tattooed doorman to Director Liz Anne McGregor, seemed to be on first name basis with ‘Annie’.
And the exhibition? The longer the looking, the greater the irritation. Celebrity contamination is rife now, and brings with it a kind of paralysis when looking at ‘works of art’ by creators who have become celebrities themselves. Leibovitz’s efflorescence began with photographing the famous: she is probably best known for her arresting image of pregnant actress Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in 1992, but she has also taken a number of psychologically penetrating portraits, such as the sombre and symmetrical images of General Schwarzkopf (1991) and General Colin Powell (1991).
More recently, Leibovitz’s personal life took some unexpected twists and turns and, thanks to the fog of schadenfreude which rises around the doings of the well-known or over-exposed, the American press made a picnic of it. Leibovitz is one of the highest-paid photographers in the world, yet her real-estate ventures and some other initiatives have left her in a precarious financial situation. According to some press reports, she borrowed an amount of $24 million from Art Capital and now her entire photographic output is hostage, thanks to an agreement to sell her archives, her negatives and the copyright attached to those archives.
Leibovitz was born at the beginning of a golden age for the western world — America in particular — where western economies would recover from the devastation of World War 2 and embark on a rainbow trajectory of optimism, consumerism and idealism which only diminished in brightness towards the end of the 1960s. An entire generation of western youth grew to adulthood with careers and jobs just waiting to be plucked. Talent and opportunity were more relevant than a kite-tail of paper credentials.
Leibovitz was born in Westbury, Connecticut, in 1949. Her father Sam was an Air Force lieutenant and her mother Marilyn was a modern dance instructor, so we might speculate that a genetic inheritance of discipline and creativity were there from the outset. Her first interest was painting and she enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute to study it, but during that time she found a greater interest in photography. A brief spell on an Israeli kibbutz was followed in 1970 by a job with a fledgling rock music magazine: Rolling Stone (perhaps her first experience of the serendipitous). By 1972 she would be promoted to chief photographer and would remain so for a decade.
In 1975, when The Rolling Stones band embarked on their international tour, Leibovitz’s eminent position with the magazine gave her the opportunity to accompany them — another serendipitous marker for her career. The photos she took at this time give the first serious indication of her use of bold colour and unexpected poses, which would blossom fully when she began contributing photos to Vanity Fair. It has been suggested that a number of her photos, for example The Beatles’ John Lennon posing naked and curled around his fully clothed wife Yoko Ono in 1980, had turned Rolling Stone’s covers into collectors’ pieces, and her arresting portrait of the actress Whoopi Goldberg, partly submerged in a bathtub of milk for Vanity Fair, revealed a talent for encouraging sitters to by viscerally involved in the production of their own image.
During the late 1980s, Leibovitz produced work for such high-profile companies as American Express, which, at the time, was conducting an intensive membership campaign. Prestigious ‘names’ such as Luciano Pavarotti were recruited, so that the subliminal idea of being identified with the rich and celebrated was activated. For this body of work she won the 1987 Clio Award.
In 1997, Leibovitz’s travelling exhibition in Europe prompted Polish journalist Anna Bohdziewicz to interview Leibovitz at the Warsaw Hotel in Bristol. This interview has a curiously unscripted and rambling feel to it — as if she was far enough away from the glamour’s centre of gravity to feel expansive and candid. Thus, we glean some insights into the mechanisms behind Leibovitz’s choice of photography as a vocation, in spite of the opacity of many of her responses.
The first question: Are you shy? Answer: “Oh! We are all shy. No one knows how to talk … There must be a reason why people who are photographers are not very good at verbal communication … But I know from my own personal experience that it’s hard to watch something going on and then suddenly be talking at the same time.”
To the interviewer’s question about hiding shyness behind a camera, Leibovitz suggested that when she was young the camera was like a friend — a companion — that you could visit places with. “And it’s also a licence and it makes you feel you have a right to walk around and you are doing something. I think what happens is that you forget you’re there ... But things change, you get older and you have different tools and a different approach and you learn to use photography differently. ... When I was younger I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I remember going down to the docks in San Francisco and asking a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera ... I think it’s a licence. In times it has been a protection.”
To return to the Sydney exhibition and some of its highlights. These ranged from her still lives of stones and shells, where she invests inanimate objects with a certain life, and haunting large-scaled atmospheric black and white landscapes to works which hint obliquely at inhumanity and destruction. Once such was a virtually abstract photo of a red smear on a sand-coloured wall titled Traces of a massacre of Tutsi schoolchildren and villagers on a bathroom wall, Shangi Mission School, Rwanda, 1994. To a collector of modern Australian art, it resembles nothing so much as a detail from a Fred Williams canvas, but, of course, it is not intended that the viewer read it as an abstract excursion — a telling example of how the photographer cannot always be in control of how the eye apprehends a two-dimensional image on a wall.
Leibovitz’s giant landscapes will undoubtedly receive pygmy-sized attention, falling, as they do, outside her immediately recognisable works. They are, however, truly striking — sombre and elemental — and appear to pay homage to the early landscape painters of America, who were overwhelmed by the scale and nature of the untamed world before them — believing it to be God’s handiwork. For example, the monumental photo titled Monument Valley, Arizona (1993) might put some viewers in mind of the majestic canvases of the American Hudson River School painter, Edwin Church, who died in 1900. Mt Vesuvius, Naples (1982) is another splendid example, and one could surmise that it may have been prompted by her partner Susan Sontag’s memorable book about Sir William Hamilton — The Volcano Lover.
Leibovitz has said: “I have a more powerful voice as a photographer if I express a point of view.” Putting aside the gap between the banality of the comment and the acuity of some of her photographic results, occasionally her point of view has left an unpleasant aftertaste. For example, there is the black and white documentary photo (1993) of a mortally wounded soldier lying on a hospital bed in a Kosovo hospital, surrounded by doctors. They don’t look particularly happy with the intrusion. And there was something quite chilling about comments she made after the event: “I think he died while I was taking the picture.”
Is it ever acceptable to photograph a dying person? One thinks of soldiers and prison guards who have deliberately documented the miseries inflicted on prisoners (or detainees — the sanitised word which substitutes for it) on their watch. Her photographs of the life slipping away from her partner, likewise prompt mixed feelings. It seems now that nothing is private. Every intimacy is now acceptable fodder for pixels. We have only to recall the funerals of public figures, politicians and slain gangsters, all conducted in the full glare of the television cameras, to see how the idea of grieving privately has been rendered old-fashioned. The viewer becomes a voyeur to the excruciating spectacle of people unable — or unwilling — to shepherd their feelings.
Her finest portraits are not of film stars like Brad Pitt, sprawled on a bed in Las Vegas, in a photo bathed in lurid light or of Australia’s Nicole Kidman in a fantasy ball gown. The latter an undistinguished piece of photography, with foggy lights intended to convey an ethereal air but which only occlude the image. The composition is clumsy, with an ill-positioned drape and a missed opportunity to convey the scale and grandeur of the setting. One thinks with nostalgia of the ball gowns brought to life by the incandescent Claudia Cardinale in scenes from Visconti’s film The Leopard.
But among the truly memorable portraits must be numbered fellow photographer Richard Avedon (best known for his photographic shoots for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar), the actor Daniel Day Lewis, who is posed so that he resembles a prince in an Italian Renaissance painting, a pouting Mick Jagger in figure-hugging pants and loafers, and a portrait of Philip Johnson, the architect of the celebrated Glass House at Connecticut, gazing pensively from one of its glass walls in 2000. (He died five years later at ninety-nine.)
This writer’s largest criticism of the exhibition is the unwieldy melange of the grand, distinguished and famous with the small-scale, modest domestic family scenes. Each genre distracts from, and diminishes the other. The family images are tender and affectionate, but they are overwhelmed by the vast, almost abstracted landscapes, the rich and famous, and the genuinely notable. They deserve an exhibition of their own, without the distractions of model Kate Moss and boyfriend on another anonymous hotel bed.
Many readers will recall a different experience of photography. In the 1950s, the black and white ‘snaps’ from the Box Brownie camera seemed magical, and the large studio photograph with its delicate hand-tinted gelato colours was especially admired.
When photos came back from the chemist shop in a brown envelope, the ritual of looking began. It started with the first surprise of seeing yourself somewhere other than in a mirror and finished decades later, with the same photography preserving you perfectly like a fly in amber. Yet the snapshot offered less and less, the more you looked at it, and no-one knows this better than the traveller. What was meant to be an aide memoire — something which will illuminate the occasion in all of its sensations — shrinks with every viewing. Bit by bit, the memory of the event becomes elusive as well. The longer the looking, the greater the forgetting. After a while you stop ‘seeing’ the photo altogether.
There is another element of significance here. Novelist Helen Garner once mused in an article called ‘Adrift in a floating world’ that people are terrified of forgetting. This terror “drives people to raise a camera between themselves and everything they encounter — as if direct experience were unbearable and they had to shield themselves from it, filter it through a machine store up a silent, odourless vision of it for later, rather than endure it now”. This observation questions the whole notion of how we experience anything we point a camera at. The experience becomes not what prompted one to raise the camera in the first place, but the possibility of an experience edited to our satisfaction.
And how did Sydney art critics respond to Annie Leibovitz’s exhibition? Christopher Allen, The Australian’s art critic, suggested that her work demonstrated a facility for both the spontaneity of outdoor locations as well as the tightly controlled environment of the studio.
John MacDonald remarked in The Sydney Morning Herald that Susan Sontag, her partner, had succumbed to cancer in December 2004 and six months later Leibovitz’s father died, “leaving her with a double bundle of grief”. He suggested that this caused her to “include a mass of personal material, treating the show as an extension of the mourning process”. McDonald also noted that there are echoes of other photographers. “There is no suggestion of plagiarism in these works but they are strongly formulaic — an occupational hazard for a sought-after portraitist who has to keep coming up with one killer image after another for a magazine cover. This goes beyond the call of art and takes us onto the assembly line.”
And what are Australian photographers up to right now? Brett East, who shows at Gallery 9 in Darlinghurst and who is featured in this issue, is a painter who has recently produced large-scale photos of his paintings of tubes squirting paint. These remind us that not only can colour overwhelm the senses but that a painting itself can be transformed into another medium altogether with no loss of edge.
East’s works are celebrating the very means by which colour makes its way to a canvas. That is to say, the pigment which squirts from the lead tube. This metallic wonder — a creation of the mid-nineteenth century — allowed painters to leave their mortars and pestles for grinding pigments behind in the studio and go outdoors with their brushes. Hello haystacks, hello field of poppies, hello boating parties … hello impressionism!
While East’s work is incremental — it takes him months to complete a painting — the results have the momentum and exuberance of a flamenco performer. He once said this about making a work: “It takes years and years of practice. At art school you start with monochromes. Then you learn about tone. And then … colours come in and your mind just explodes.” For him, colour has a singular power, it can work on the emotions in entirely subliminal ways and it can behave or misbehave with other colours.
He has also mused on the dilemmas of modern digital printers whose capacities are growing all the time, but do not, as yet, match the human eye in apprehending fine distinctions. This matters a great deal to him because in his large-scale photographs of his paintings, the transformations which occur when one medium is transformed into another are not easy to control.
Ben Garrard, aAR’s web manager and a contributor to the magazine, recently returned from Europe with some crisp and memorable images redolent of our ancient past and a very modern world alongside it. They combine an instinctive feeling of composition and a finely tuned colour sense.
Danny Cohen, who studied photography at RMIT and exhibits at Flinders Lane Gallery, recently created a series of quirky assemblages, such as a man dressed in eighteenth-century garments riding a polar bear, which link the natural world to the world of pure artifice.
In his recent series called Dragonfly, Luke Hardy created an allusive narrative, where someone resembling a mediaeval knight flies through an imagined realm. The deliberate blurring of the images suggests swift movement and narrative continuity. Hardy has been short-listed for Australia’s Head-On Portrait Prize on four occasions and in 2008 was shortlisted for the 57th Blake Prize.
What each of these photographers demonstrate, whether they at the beginning of their photographic careers or well launched along an exhibition trajectory, is that the imperatives surrounding photography are not primarily technical in origin (new technologies are merely another tool for the imaginative) and they are not dissimilar from those inherent in the painted canvas or the watercolour.
That is to say: originality, an eye for the mysterious, the beautiful, the incongruous and the fanciful, an inherent sense of form and composition, an innate flair for colour, an instant reckoning of tonal possibilities (which might be compared to possessing perfect pitch) and perhaps a regard for framing a historical moment in a blaze of aesthetic surprise.
What a seasoned viewer instinctively looks for is, in fact, a fingerprint, some characteristic which will define a particular aesthetic. That is to say, qualities which allow the viewer to know exactly whose photo it is, without having to look for a signature — in the same way that a single bar of music will announce the composer to a listener.
While photography has been able to fix the transitory, it can now manipulate what it depicts, invent narratives from collaged images and sometimes construct itself from non-narrative elements. The photograph has become a stage set. The Melbourne photographer Marian Drew produced a series of works which were undoubtedly inspired by her study of still-life paintings in German museums in 2002. When she returned to Australia, her memories of these blended with her observations of wildlife killed on roads and in domestic environments. This remarkable body of work kindles layers of response, thanks to the memory of the long-standing tradition of the painted still life and a current knowledge of the sophistication of modern photographic techniques.
There is also the unmistakeable reference to memento mori (be mindful of death), an admonition frequently offered in post-Renaissance canvases whose decomposing fruit, snail trails, skulls and timepieces all alluded to the temporary nature of life.
One of the virtues of a photograph (alongside the painting) is its fixed position in a world where images are increasingly transient; its silence in an increasingly noisy world. To stand in front of a photograph or a painting is to allow one’s floating and unfocused thoughts to assemble themselves. The novelist Julian Davies once said: “A thought is a place you can go to” and indeed, a photograph and a painting provide the same safe haven.
And while we are on the subject of stillness, those beloved tableaus of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might strike us as curiously stilted now, but they were, in effect, a forerunner of American photographer Cindy Sherman’s posed cibachromes. The idea of a single ‘attitude’ or ‘pose’ being struck — carefully constructed in every detail — to invoke a mood, a theme or a collective myth got a rapturous response from the late eighteenth-century salon. In our own times, we might consider that the mobile tableau of the midday television ‘soapie’ has more than a little in common with its eighteenth-century counterpart.
The carefully constructed tableaus of Kozka Bronek recreate entire chapters of a narrative without a single word of explanation, and linger in the mind even when the image is no longer there. Some reconstruct scenes from the suburban 1950s and 1960s, all bathed in a strange twilight; others assemble elements of the murky underworld and counter-cultures. In the latter, the lighting is calibrated for minimal disclosure and maximum menace.
Today, one of Australia’s most celebrated artists is Tracy Moffatt, a photographer and filmmaker whose psychological and technical range has captivated the easily jaded New York art world as well as the local scene. When Daniel Thomas launched her survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2003, he suggested that Moffatt captured “the humiliations and ecstasies in our own backyard” and “the tragedy at the margins of our attention”. In 2004, her series of nine brilliantly coloured photographs, Something More, sailed through the secondary art market to sell for $226,575 at a Christie’s auction.
Images from top:
Annie Leibovitz, Patti Smith with her Children, Jackson and Jesse, St. Clair Shores, Michigan, 1996, Photograph ©Annie Leibovitz. From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005.
Annie Leibovitz, Susan Sontag at Petra, Jordan, 1994, chromogenic print. Photograph ©Annie Leibovitz. From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005.
Ben Garrard, Makrygianni, Athens, 2011.
Ben Garrard, Rooftops, Oia, Santorini, 2011.
Danny Cohen, Polar Bear, 2011, pigment on Museo Silver Rag, 101 x 101cm.
Danny Cohen, Hyena, 2011, pigment on Museo Silver Rag, 101 x 10cm.
Luke Hardy, Fushimi, 2009, 60 x 60cm.
Luke Hardy, Dragonfly IX, 2005–2009, 60 x 60cm.
Marian Drew, Bandicoot with quince, 2005, archival pigments on German etching paper, 112 x 134cm.
Marian Drew, Wombat and watermelon, 2005, archival pigments on Germain etching paper, 112 x 134cm.
Bronek Kozka, The Best Years of Our Lives, 2008, archival pigment inkjet digital print, 80 x 120cm.
Bronek Kozka, Sunshine House, 2008, archival pigment inkjet digital print, 80 x 120cm.
