So last weekend the hottest ticket in town was at, of all places, the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was the last weekend for Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, a much-hyped retrospective of the famed photographer’s work from 1990-2005. The show was sold out for the whole weekend, but luckily we had bought our online earlier. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have to wait in line, though. The will call line to just get in the building was down the block. And then when we finally made it inside, it was like Disneyworld—another room full of snaking lines. We were only left with about an hour and a half to see the show, but we managed to plow through without too much trouble.
But back to the exhibit… conventional wisdom suggested that this would have been a deeply personal show for Liebovitz given that it chronicled the death of the births of her children, death of her father, and the long illness and eventual death of her partner, the art historian Susan Sontag (referred to throughout the exhibit as her “long-time friend”… don’t even get me started). I was expecting something not quite a swan song—she’s 58 and clearly has many productive years ahead of her—but something approaching that idea. I expected to see some kind of tangible shift in her work during the highs and lows of that time. I expected to leave with the same “heavy” as walking out of Sally Mann’s What Remains. What we really saw more of Liebovitz’s established style chronicling events that just happened to be taking place in her own life. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, though. Knowing the personal loss she suffered, I actually saw in the photographs a hope and perseverance I wasn’t looking for.
Generally speaking, the photographs of her family were much more interesting than the celebrity photographs that made her famous. There were only a few of the celebrity portraits that I hadn’t seen before—the iconic photos of Demi Moore, Mick Jagger, Hillary Clinton, Chris Rock, Scarlett Johanson, HRH Queen Elizabeth (it was actually the first time those photos were on public display, even though they hit the AP wire a couple of months ago), etc. Not terribly surprising, but no one does it better than her. The family photographs, on the other hand, were presented in a smaller scale and had much more of a spontaneous snapshot quality. I was also pleasantly surprised with a small collection of really elegant photos of athletes.
The show ended with a newer series of landscapes shown in monumental scale, and while the symbolism of moving forward with her work following personal tragedy was clear, I wouldn’t consider it her best work. Overall, though, great show that you should try to catch if it travels near you.
