More than other photographers with access to A-listers and the political elite, Annie Leibovitz lives among the stars. He captured President Nixon’s abject escape from the White House, as well as a legion of artists, from Keith Haring at the height of his fame to a lanky David Byrne. Magazine photography has never been the same since Leibovitz invited John Lennon to curl like a child around Yoko Ono on what turned out to be the last day of his life, in 1980, to Rolling Stone. Eleven years later, for the same publication, he photographed Demi Moore naked and pregnant, again revolutionizing commercial portraiture.
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These images, along with 300 or so others, appear in one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of his career, currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. But don’t assume that the show, which runs until January 29 before traveling to other museums, is a typical retrospective.
Most retrospectives are chronological and remain unchanged over the course of their careers. However, since its opening this fall, Leibovitz, 74, was still shooting footage for the show. What the show is today may be different from what it was yesterday or will be when it is displayed elsewhere. That’s a testament to the trust Alejo Benedetti, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, placed in Leibovitz, and the power of any permutation of images he could produce.
The exhibition begins at the dawn of his career in mid-century America, continues with his cultural ascension during the punk era, and ends with recently taken photographs commissioned for Crystal Bridges. Leibovitz stressed, however, that the show isn’t just a means to follow the arc of his career. Instead, he told reporters, it should be an inspiration “for young photographers.”
His first two rooms, which contain 54 years of archival material, are “set up as kind of a moment for me,” he added, describing them as the shoots that taught him to be an artist. (She refers to herself as a “conceptual photographer,” rather than a photojournalist, the term more commonly applied to her.)
The photographs you took on commission appear here as a digital presentation, rather than as prints. Its subjects are more glorious and remote than any covering star: space, as seen through the monitors of the NASA technicians tasked with illuminating its (largely) achromatic dust storms. Earlier this year, Leibovitz was invited to NASA’s inner sanctum in Houston, where she photographed, in addition to the monitors, the Artemis II astronauts in their orange jumpsuits and sleek metallic spacecraft.
Leibovitz is a meticulous portraitist, and her best-known images reintroduce celebrities in unexpected circumstances that evoke unexpected expressions. But the space keeps its history; there is no face or figure to grasp. That, I think, is what makes these images so intimate. For all the sensationalism, they read like self-portraits, in the same vein as his “Pilgrimage” series “Pilgrimage” – another commission, shot in this case for the Smithsonian between 2009 and 2011 – presents landscapes devoid of people: geysers and steep cliffs and hermetic forests. These images are infinitely more mysterious than a celebrity portrait and promise an exciting and irreverent direction for the later stages of the project.
Like most of Leibovitz’s other projects, this show, titled “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” started with one person: Alice L. Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune and founder of Crystal Bridges, who brought Leibovitz to Bentonville in 2021 to a portrait . Walton then invited Leibovitz to exhibit at the museum, but Leibovitz said he would prefer to show new work. Walton agreed, making Crystal Bridges the first museum to commission Leibovitz to create new images for its permanent collection.
Crystal Bridges dedicated five rooms and 5,800 square meters to the show. It turns out that the institution and Leibovitz are a good match. The museum opened in 2011 with a mission to welcome “everyone to celebrate the American spirit,” said Olivia Walton, president of the museum’s board of directors. ARTnews. “We consider ourselves a platform for diverse storytellers and different perspectives. And I think that’s exactly what this exhibition does. Capture some of our country’s leading thinkers and celebrate them. Also, we’re emphasizing female artists, because we’re trying to tell this more inclusive story of the history of American art and the history of our country.”
Some of Leibovitz’s subjects are not American, but they share “American” attributes, as defined (in generous terms) by the Western media: charisma, individualism, ambition.
Leibovitz has had free rein with his latest subjects, and the results are eclectic. Its rabbi, Angela Warnick Buchdahl of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, the first woman in its 180-year history to lead the Reform congregation, appears in a blue shirt and pants that match the lake’s muted landscape. In another work, there is billionaire Elon Musk, shown with his mother Maye. According to Leibovitz, Elon agreed to the shoot, but she proved elusive, which inspired his studio to call Maye for help. She put it in front of Lieboitz’s camera the next day.
Some of the most exciting work in 2023 features famous sculptors, dancers and painters, including Julie Mehretu and Michael Heizer. The latter was photographed walking among his masterpiece, city, the vast facility in the Nevada desert that was 50 years under construction before opening to the public. In my favorite image of that batch, Golden Lion-winning sculptor Simone Leigh emerges like a ceramic bust from one of her bell-shaped raffia skirts. Leigh and Heizer shoot stunners for the same reason: they both illustrate how great artists realize complicated desires while the rest of us fumble.
These new and recent works are projected on four monumental screens that surround the viewer. Over the 25 minutes or so it takes for the images to cycle through, you can experience whiplash as you turn your head in different directions, try to capture or study an image. The appeal of digital presentation is clear: colors are sharp and editing is easy. (Leibovitz, on the other hand, was eager to get feedback on the setting during interviews.) However, a curious viewer may find this setting lacking in clarity and context.
Author Salman Rushdie, for example, first appears on screen healthy and relaxed, and nestled among a crowd of friends. Later in the cycle, there is a tense portrait taken sometime after the 2022 stabbing that left him blind in his right eye. This could be an opportunity to study how circumstances sweep and reinvent their captives. But because it happens so quickly, it’s hard to notice much about these striking images.
Rushdie isn’t the only person Leibovitz has shot multiple times throughout his career. In an interview, he described the process of photographing Joan Didion in the 1970s and then again towards the end of her life. “I took that [last] photo, but you know, I really didn’t want to post it,” Leibovitz said. They both appear on this show, though, and it would be instructive to look like they’re hanging together.
What if all of Leibovitz’s archival materials, especially the famous ones, were allowed less routine arrangements or more challenging wall texts? What remains to be known about images that have been cherry-picked by critics for decades and are inextricable from the American imagination? The answer cannot be “nothing”.
Archive photographs of Annie Leibovitz installed at the Crystal Bridges Museum.
This is not to say that Leibovitz’s photography is any less impactful. In 2023, the number of true celebrities, those who have a real influence on the public consciousness, is dwindling. However, Leibovitz remained a true believer in star power, and some of the more recent work bears witness to that, with appearances by Bruce Springsteen and Cindy Sherman, among others.
Older and lesser-known images of celebrities also make an impact. Some feature his longtime partner, the late thinker and writer Susan Sontag. In one image, an elderly Sontag and her friends, both dressed as bears, can be seen showing off in what could be the lobby of a hotel or expensive apartment complex. They have wine flutes in one hand, cameras in the other; glances and gestures both trained outside the frame, towards the future.
