What Makes Annie Shoot?
The great Leibovitz realized she was never a journalist but made news with magazine covers. An artist who was once fascinated with her subjects lately seems largely fascinated with herself
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The Observatory
“I look back at it now,” Annie Leibovitz said at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1991, “I realize that one of the things I loved toward the end at Rolling Stone were the conceptual covers.” She had left for Vanity Fair in 1983, in part to follow an art director she admired. There she did little until Tina Brown arrived all bluster and balls in 1984—and then she did a lot.
Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s owner-operator, had become overly concerned about newsstand sales. “He wanted really clean, you know, head shots really. There was a study—they started to do studies, you know,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “And they came up with this study that the conceptual covers didn’t sell well because the person wasn’t recognizable. … For example, the Steve Martin photograph against the Franz Kline painting was the worst-selling cover that year.”
Annie Leibovitz had gotten too rock ’n’ roll for Rolling Stone.
That worst-selling cover—from February 1982—is a real mess, in today’s focus-group-in-a-Chicago-mall terms. Mr. Martin, in a suit, is painted with crude black stripes, and is in mid-campy-dance-step. The black-and-white painting looms beyond him. (Inside you might have learned that he would prefer not to discuss his relationship with Bernadette Peters.)
Then there was her Matt Dillon cover late that year. Mr. Dillon, pouty and incredibly young, is in slacks and shirt and tie, twisted and reclining, one leg up, thereby showing half his ass—and with his crotch placed nearly dead center on the magazine’s cover. What definitely seems to be Mr. Dillon’s extended middle finger rests near his square hairline. It was her last Rolling Stone cover. Now that’s how you say goodbye—to your magazine, your youth, whatever.
Ms. Leibovitz was, for much of the 80’s, an unusual bridge between the fine art world and the commercial world. This meant that in her practice she gathered commerce in one hand and journalism in the other.
Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz.
“‘Mr. President, wave!’ Annie suddenly called as they ambled toward the residence,” Tina Brown wrote in The Washington Post a few years back of the 1989 Vanity Fair shoot of Ron and Nancy Reagan.
Ms. Leibovitz had the two in Christmas-red cashmere sweaters.
Ms. Brown went on: “‘Whom are we waving at?’ Mrs. Reagan asked. ‘Congress, Nancy,’ said the president.”
It is hard to pinpoint the year and time in which Ms. Leibovitz’s balance collapsed, but it may very well have been 1989, and it may have been right there in the Rose Garden.
But there were so many other opportunities along her path between touring with the Rolling Stones in the mid-70’s to her show of portraits of women, called, handily, “Women.” I caught that one at the Corcoran in D.C., eight years ago.
The larger prints were actually split and mounted on two separate backings, with a vast seam running vertically down the middle. This wasn’t photography as museums know it. It was a collection of cheaply produced touring posters.
By 2003, she was subject to a brutal takedown by Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times. Among the kinder ideas expressed, she described Ms. Leibovitz as being “devoutly committed to portraiture while seeming remarkably uninterested in people.”
In 2006, she was untouched by an attack by Times art critic Roberta Smith, on the occasion of a Brooklyn Museum retrospective. It was a vicious amplification of Ms. Smith’s 1991 opinion of Ms. Leibovitz’s sort-of tautological problem: Her “images are only as interesting as the achievements or public persona of her subjects.”
Ms. Leibovitz was busy shooting Disney campaigns, American Express campaigns, Vogue campaigns, Gap campaigns—and who can forget all her work on behalf of those dairy pimps, the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, which had peaked early with the publication of 1998’s The Milk Mustache Book: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at America’s Favorite Advertising Campaign?
“The truth is, I thought I was doing journalism, but I really wasn’t,” Ms. Leibovitz told Powell’s Books in 1999. “When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that’s what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. What became important was to have a point of view.” Next Page >
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I find her work singularly mediocre. She is a hack. Why is her greatness always taken for granted? She is a horrible, horrible photographer. The photographs of her mother cutting a fart in her coffee table book should be studied as an example of self indulgence and egocentric insanity. Please, someone get her camera and smash it. She stands for everything that was ever wrong with the American magazine industry when it existed. Awful photographer. Bad photographer with a bad attitude. Send her back to photography school. She sucks.
Good point, what's so great about Annie Liebowitz? I find her photos blah at best. Unimaginative, uninspired and poorly lit. Poorly composed, in short, dullsville. At best they are in focus. At worst, they demand she be fired immediately.
If I ever see any of her work, I instantly cancel my subscription to whatever publication it is. Likewise, when I see her commercial work, I immediately put that product on my list if items and brands never to purchase again as long as I live.
I used to live in London Towers right down the hall from Susan Sontag. You couldn't ask for a more unpleasant neighbor. She was like human garbage, treated her staff like slaves, illegal workers, underpaid, verbally abused, you name it. Frankly when she died the whole building rejoiced in her demise. Good riddance.
I agree, the photos of her mother farting and spreading her ass cheeks as if to lay out a loaf of poo were disgusting...definitely not art. Any good photographer would throw them away, but she uses everything she shoots as she's only in it for the money...what a fine con she has played to get to the top...her work is truly awful....
Has the writer actually read Rogers v Koons or seen the original photograph which Koons copied? Koons copied a cute photograph because he knew it was a striking visual image and he could make a lot of money from it.
Koons did not mock the original photograph in his work. It was an exact copy, albeit in a different medium. The court could not find any element of parody in Koon’s sculpture. The court said "it is not really the parody flag that appellants are sailing under, but rather the flag of piracy."
Rogers v Koons is correct.
You people are being typical internet haters. I don't think her work is great or art or anything to celebrate. Yes they are vapid portraits and she has a team of like 20 people create them like a movie. But don't say they are 'bad' photographs. They might not be your style but like the criticism "they are only as interesting as the subjects." Sometimes they are and that's enough! She has taken a lot of good photographs. With that said, the Disney ads are truly horrible and creepy.
Regarding Koons - the thing I don't get is "albeit in a different medium" isn't shifting the medium enough to remove it from copyright? Let's say Koons' M. Jackson and Bonzo sculpture was based on a photo he saw in Star magazine - isn't turning a tiny photo in a magazine into a giant porcelain object original enough? Or what about Richter doing paintings based on photographs (or Warhol?)
what a disgusting paragraph, should I say:
"And there was LeBron James, on the cover of this April’s Vogue, hustling both a ball and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen in either an ***unlikely conscious homage to 75-year-old imagery of King Kong or in just, say, a randomly discovered, formally pleasing, overly lit and magazine-friendly arrangement of the human figures that so happened to have been negotiated for cover placement and that, among all the shots taken, tested best among women of a certain age bracket that had been recently gathered in some horrible room with no exterior windows in a mall.***" my marks. Jesus!
i havent really known that much of her except what i saw on Ellens show once and i didnt see anything spectacular. I am an avid photographer and do much better at capturing awestruck moments than she does!
I'm not at all surprised that it was Liebowitz who took the photos of Mylie Cyrus that are causing uproar - I know where I believe the blame lies, & it's not w/ 'Hannah'.
Typical Liebowitz: poor taste, poor judgement. Shame on you!
To answer Anonymous...
The decision in Rogers v Koons says changing the medium is not enough to qualify for the fair use defense. Otherwise movie studios would be able to take a novel and turn it into a film without compensating the author or getting his or her permission. One factor was that Koons's work was an exact copy of the photo. He sent detailed notes to the factory which made the sculpture with numerous instructions to copy the photograph exactly.
Koons's basic argument was "I am an artist with a higher purpose than the photographer of the original work so I am exempt from copyright." Thankfully the court shot that argument down.
You can read the case here:
http://www.ncac.org/art-law/op-rog.cfm
Even a tiny photograph in Star Magazine is protected by copyright.
As for Richter and Warhol: I believe Richter takes his own photographs. And Warhol, when using other photographers’ images, was very careful to get permission (and pay a licensing fee) to the photographer whenever he used a photo that was not his own.
There are many artists doing this sort of thing (eg. Damian Loeb). It only becomes a problem if they get caught and if the photographer of the original work is prepared to spend a ton of money taking them to court. Loeb was taken to court once by a photographer and lost, but the movie people don’t mind him using images from their films – they even buy his paintings.