Annie Leibovitz Research Articles

A visual social semiotic investigation into the popularity of Ronaldo and Messi’s chess photo on Instagram: Implications for new media and audience engagement

This qualitative study adopts a visual social semiotic approach to examine the multifaceted engagement incited by Annie Leibovitz’s photograph portraying Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi in a contemplative game of chess, ensconced amidst an array of Louis Vuitton merchandise. Through semiotics, mise en scène, and sociolinguistics, we unravel the photograph’s layered significances, employing studium and punctum to dissect viewer engagement. Cognitive linguistics reveals the interplay of myths, metaphors, and metonymy, crafting a narrative that intertwines football, chess, and luxury into potent cultural symbols. The mise en scène theory illuminates the nuanced balance between authenticity and artifice, while sociolinguistic insights bridge visual and linguistic communications for a diverse audience. The photograph, as a convergence of composition, culture, and technology, exemplifies how visual narratives blend these elements to forge connections and evoke responses. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of digital visual storytelling’s power in shaping cultural dialogues and perceptions, showcasing the role of iconic imagery in the tapestry of social media discourse.

How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures

This article examines the visual dynamics underlying wrong-body narratives of gender through Lacanian psychoanalytic readings of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair (2015) and Pedro Almodóvar’s film La piel que habito (Spain/France, 2011). Leibovitz’s photographs, seen as the public culmination of Jenner’s gender transition, and Almodóvar’s fictional film, centered on the forced surgical sex reassignment of one of its characters, both comment on the role of technically produced images in constructing visually articulated bodily materiality as central to gender. Staged in Jenner’s domestic space, often before mirrors that reflect the camera alongside its subject, Lei-bovitz’s photos portray Jenner at the center of complex scenarios of mastery over her image. These images demonstrate an awareness of their constructed nature at the same time as they offer themselves as the optical proof of Jenner’s transition; they reveal and, ostensibly, dominate what Lacan refers to as the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of all scopic scenarios of recognition. Almodóvar’s film imagines the reverse scenario in which the body-as-image exerts violent control over the individual, not only erasing the apparent sex of one of its characters, Vicente, but also, and less tolerably, attempting to erase the absence, or misrecognition, of his body in its status as what Lacan calls “objet a,” or object of desire. The distinct ways in which Leibovitz’s images and Almodóvar’s film theorize the relationship between bodies and images with regard to misrecognition and absence point to the continued necessity of considering the influence of scopic relations in formations of gender identity.

Temporality and the Carer’s Experience in the Narrative Ecology of Illness: Susan Sontag’s Dying in Photography and Prose

This paper joins a discussion about the representational dissonance and commemorative ethics of two self-referential works that engage with Susan Sontag’s 2004 death from Myelodysplastic Syndrome: Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life1990–2005 (2006) and David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008). Instead of approaching these two texts as testimonial accounts measured by standards of reliability and grace, this paper considers how the temporal dissonance produced by an incurable cancer diagnosis thwarts questions of personhood and ethical intention in Leibovitz’s photography and Rieff ’s prose. By contextualizing these works as the caregivers’ experience of Sontag’s illness, this paper reads them as attempts at gauging two distinct temporal perspectives that confound identification—those of living through and of remembering terminal time.

The Ruby Slippers Across Time, Space and Media

This article discusses representations of Dorothy’s magical shoes in diverse media—from the original text by L. Frank Baum (1900) to the classic MGM film (1939) to Vogue’s 2005 fashion shoot by Annie Leibovitz. According to Salman Rushdie, “the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’, but rather that there is no longer any such place as home.” Canadian designer John Fluevog shares this point of view, as exemplified most prominently by The Cosmos: Meteor shoes (2016), which celebrate the road as the destination itself. I compare Fluevog to Gucci’s flamboyant Star Trek-inspired campaign GucciandBeyond (2017), as well as the brand’s more recent Utopian Fantasy campaign (2018). The essay cites, among others, Alain de Botton and Andy Warhol, both professing their fascination with air travel. Additional critical sources include Dick Hebdige’s pioneering work on style subcultures, and MOMA’s recent volume on Fashion Is. The essay’s concluding sections discusses commercial appropriation of fashion, as well as fashion’s open-ended definition.

Two Bodies of American Photographic Work from the 1960s and 1970s

The 48th (2017) edition of Les Rencontres de photographie dʼArles offered, amongst its varied and rich programme of some 40 exhibitions, retrospectives of two influential American photographers: Joel Meyerowitz: Early Works as the monographic highlight of the main programme of the Rencontres, and Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970-1983 as an associated programme commissioned and organized by the private LUMA Foundation. It is probably fair to say that the two artists are very different in...

“All One Life”: Celebrity and Intimacy in the Photographs of Annie Leibovitz

Few photographers are as well known or as representative of American celebrity culture in the contemporary media age as Annie Leibovitz. This essay analyzes Leibovitz’s influential style by situating it within the complexities of both celebrity and snapshot photography. Taking as its jumping off point Leibovitz’s 2006 retrospective, A Photographer’s Life, which pairs the photographer’s iconic celebrity portraits with dramatically personal photographs of her family, friends, and lover Susan Sontag, it examines the interrelations between celebrity artifice and interpersonal intimacy intimated by Leibovitz’s claim that together, her photographs represent “one life.” This essay offers an analysis of key shifts and contradictions in Leibovitz’s work: the evolution from the gritty realist style of her early Rolling Stone work to the highly manufactured “conceptual” work that characterizes her Portraits campaign for American Express and her more recent work for Vanity Fair, and the contradiction between Leibovitz’s iconoclast reputation and the surprisingly normative politics it supports. Yet despite these contradictions, it argues, there is a coherence in Leibovitz’s work in its reliance on manufactured intimacies. In both her personal and her professional work, Leibovitz offers a visceral, sensational image experience, but one that tells us little we didn’t already know.

Writing the Contemporary Encounter in the Museum: Dorothy Cross and Trove at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014–15*

Writing the Contemporary Encounter in the Museum:Dorothy Cross and Trove at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014–15* Niamh NicGhabhann (bio) In his exploration of contemporaneity and its discontents Pedro Erber argues that "in brief, to be contemporary is to (in a subtle, particular manner) refuse contemporaneity." Drawing on the theories of Marc Augé, Giorgio Agamben, and others, Erber parses contemporaneity in the context of an assumed shared globalized condition. The different registers of contemporaneity discussed by Erber include the condition of "coevalness" (after Johannes Fabian), based on the "dialogic interaction between human beings" and on "time shared though action, interaction, and communication" rather than on a "mere chronological relationship." Complicating this position, however, is the concept of "allochronism"—referring to the construction of distance following the period of "coevalness"—that is created through processes of transcribing, writing, and analysis. This conceptualization suggests a collapsing of clear boundaries of the contemporary and an increased emphasis on the imprecise contours of what can constitute "contemporary" experience or contemporaneity. These challenges lead Erber, drawing on the field of anthropological research, to consider Agamben's proposal in his essay "What Is the Contemporary" (2008) that "those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it." The idea that contemporaneity [End Page 244] requires a level of critical distance is further explored by Erber in relation to shared existence across different times and different epochs. Quoting Naoki Sakai, Erber argues that this condition can be based on "participating in the same discourse" or "sharing the same discursive register," opening the possibility of contemporaneity between objects or ideas from different points on a chronological spectrum.1 These different perspectives on the condition of, obstacles to, and potential for contemporaneity provide a useful frame through which to consider Trove by Dorothy Cross, an exhibition held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) from 3 December 2014 to 8 March 2015.2 In order to create Trove, Cross selected a series of objects from a range of Irish museums and arranged them in conversation with each other in the gallery space. Cross's curatorial practice in Trove reflected Terry Smith's conceptualization of curating as "making contemporaneity visible," but also challenged the limitations of the visible through her exploration of time, allusion, and humor across the exhibition.3 Cross's exploration of time and her use of museum objects as materials complicate the idea of contemporary art and her own position as a contemporary artist, resisting (and perhaps refusing) classification in a way that reflects Agamben's proposal and responds to Sakai and Erber's contention about possible conditions of contemporaneity. This essay therefore examines the idea of the contemporary as constructed by and refracted through Trove. It first describes the exhibition itself, a contemporary show curated by a contemporary artist based on chronologically wide-ranging historic objects encompassing ammonites of the Jurassic age, with an estimated age of 200 million years, to work produced in more recent years, such as the 1997 portrait of Louise Bourgeois by photographer Annie Leibovitz. The essay proposes interpretations of the exhibition and the curatorial choices made by Cross, and the practice of curating the exhibition is examined as an extension of her engagement with ideas [End Page 245] of time, Surrealist juxtaposition, and contemporaneity. Trove is then positioned within the context of Cross's broader installation-based and site-specific works. The perspectives on contemporaneity outlined by Erber are valuable in the context of the use of the designation "contemporary" within the sphere of visual art. The concepts of coevalness, allochronism, critical distance, and shared discourses can be used here to negotiate the ideas of the contemporary as employed within art-critical or art-historical discourse. Terry Smith has outlined the growth and formation of the subject of contemporary art as a specific field of art-historical investigation.4 Smith's essay is helpful not only in parsing the different definitions of the term contemporary, but also in the way that he describes the use of...

Retouching Queer Kinship

Annie Leibovitz's postmortem photograph of Susan Sontag in A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 publicizes its subject in the same visual space that protects its privacy, writing over its contemporaneity with a series of more legible nineteenth-century and modernist visual codes, just as it aspires to write over celebrity spectacle with the intimate and sustained gaze of contemplation and witness. This process of writing over is not just spatial but temporal, anchored in moments of rupture, suture, and recursivity, as well as in strategies through which the apparently static image aspires to acknowledge, touch, and potentially rework its usable pasts. The volume's collective use of “temporal asynchrony” constitutes a queering of the latent teleologies of linear sequence (from the teleology of heterosexual reproduction to the inscription of ideas of social order broadly), and in terms requisite to Leibovitz's project to redescribe kinship as queer or lesbian history.

“Mother Superior”: Maternity and Creativity in the Work of Yoko Ono

“Mother Superior”Maternity and Creativity in the Work of Yoko Ono Elizabeth Ann Lindau (bio) Hours before his assassination on December 8, 1980, John Lennon posed for Annie Leibovitz’s camera. Just as he had on the newly released album Double Fantasy, Lennon insisted that his wife and artistic collaborator, Yoko Ono, participate in the photo shoot with him. In the iconic image that appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone’s tribute to the slain ex-Beatle a month later, he appears naked, curling around his fully clothed wife in a fetal position. Ono appears indifferent to the fervent kiss Lennon plants on her cheek. Her eyes gaze past him. Her arms, casually crossed behind her head, do not return his embrace. She appears cool and in control, he fragile, clinging, and vulnerable. Lennon told Leibovitz, “You’ve captured our relationship exactly,” suggesting a childlike dependence on his wife.1 Indeed, Lennon once said of Ono, “I occasionally call her Mother because I used to call her Mother Superior—remember ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’ She is Mother Superior, she is Mother Earth, she is the mother of my child, she’s my mother, she’s my daughter. . . . The relationship goes through many levels.”2 Ono’s maternal role in Lennon’s life is often the subtext of vitriolic attacks against her as “the woman who broke up the Beatles.” In some analyses of their marriage, she wielded a sinister power over him, smothering his creative impulses to single-handedly dissolve the world’s most beloved rock band. During a cameo appearance in Justin Timberlake’s 2013 single “Murder,” Jay-Z names Ono as the epitome of the dangerous seductress described throughout the song: “Know that shit gotta be lethal / If that pussy broke up The Beatles.”3 [End Page 57] Despite such portrayals of her as rock’s mortal enemy, Ono has gained wider appreciation over the past two decades. She has earned belated respect as a godmother of punk and “world” music thanks in part to rock journalists such as Jonathan Cott, one early defender of what Lennon called her “sixteen-track voice.”4 Fellow musicians from Ornette Coleman to Thurston Moore to Lady Gaga have also recognized her importance through collaborations and tributes. (Moore’s 1995 song “Ono Soul” begins with the lyric: “Bow down to the queen of noise.”)5 Ono’s work as both musician and visual artist was institutionally recognized in 2001 with the acclaimed yes Yoko Ono retrospective and in 2015 with the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of her early work, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971.6 In the past decade, she has attracted the attention of prominent music scholars. Tamara Levitz reads her collaborations with Lennon as expressions of gender and racial equality.7 Barry Shank explains her incorporation of aesthetics and singing techniques from the Japanese traditions of Noh and Kabuki.8 As part of her ongoing work on “migrant cosmopolitanism,” Brigid Cohen documents Ono’s friendship with composer Stefan Wolpe, with whom she bonded over their shared experiences of displacement in 1950s New York City.9 This essay explores what Lennon identified as Ono’s polyvalent role as mother, tracing the maternal as a recurring topic in her music, art, and biography. Ono’s portrayals of motherhood in different media begin in the early 1960s and extend to recent work with the newly re-formed Plastic Ono Band. Some pieces contain heart-rending depictions of lost or absent children, while others suggest that childrearing is the ultimate act of artistic creativity. These divergent, sometimes contradictory portrayals of maternity reflect the range of Ono’s personal experiences and of contemporary second-wave feminist discussions of motherhood, which depict the womb as both the root of woman’s subjugation and the source of her power. Ono aligns the exclusively female experience of birthing and the historically feminine work of mothering with creativity and avant-garde artistic production. Ono articulated her ideas about motherhood through the unlikely idioms of avant-garde art and rock music (and hybrids of these two). Neither creative realm is known as a platform for feminist positions. The avant-gardes’ aesthetic [End Page 58...

Susan Sontag: a biography

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was one of America's first celebrity intellectuals. In the first biography to be published since her death, Daniel Schreiber portrays a glamorous woman full of contradictions and inner conflicts, whose life mirrored the cultural upheavals of her time. While known primarily as a cultural critic and novelist, Sontag was also a filmmaker, stage director, and dramatist. It was her status as a pop icon that was unusual for an American intellectual: she was filmed by Andy Warhol and Woody Allen, photographed by Annie Leibovitz and Diane Arbus, and her likeness adorned advertisements for Absolut vodka. Drawing on newly available sources, including interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Robert Wilson, and Sontag's son, David Rieff, as well as on myriad interviews given by Sontag and her extensive correspondence with her friend and publisher Roger Straus, Schreiber explores the roles that Sontag played in influencing American public cultural and political conversations.

Sontag’s late lesbianism: sexuality, photography, celebrity

This essay is concerned with two public figures whose intimate relationship complicates their established independent celebrity – on the one hand, Susan Sontag, an intellectual star whose authorial persona kept in play the open secret of her bisexuality; and, on the other, Annie Leibovitz, a photographer whose reputation derives from her capacity to capture the celebrity of others. As many specialist and non-specialist commentators note, Sontag always operated with a keen eye to the forms of celebrity sustained across the expanded literary marketplace and the middlebrow print-media of the 1960s–1980s. Across her career the celebrity-effect Sontag cultivated drew on the modernist ideal of a literary and cultural original, hence the significance she placed on the holograph documentation deposited at UCLA that now comprises the Sontag Papers, an extensive collection of manuscripts, journals, lecture notes and correspondence. But from the late 1980s onwards, Sontag’s celebrity avatar was increasingly drawn into the image-driven circuits associated with Leibovitz’s rising fame as the premiere photographer of contemporary celebrity. Occurring primarily at the level of image, Sontag’s photographic entanglement with Leibovitz reveals how lesbian celebrity, even in its most reflexive iterations, derives its charge from the volatile relations between privacy and publicity that continue to manifest in the vicinity of homosexuality.

Cockroach Aztlán: Oscar Zeta Acosta's Queer Take on the Indexical Trace and Chicano Nationalism

In 1971, Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz took Oscar Zeta Acosta's portrait for the cover of his first novel Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. The photograph that ended up on the front co...

Do These Sequins Make My Butt Look Fat? Wardrobe, Image, and the Challenge of Identity in the Music of Black American Women

When blues singer Ma Rainey stepped onto the stage in the early 1900s, resplendent in a diamond-studded tiara, a necklace made of gold pieces, and a ball gown in a rich shade of blue, audiences were no doubt bemused by the dichotomous images they saw. The appearance of the glamorously adorned, theatrical Rainey stood in stark contrast to the ordinary Rainey, whose plain face, unruly hair, and mouth filled with gold teeth were a realistic complement to her corpulent, squat body. Indeed, one of the best-known photographs of Ma Rainey is a study in paradox: soulful eyes that are at once wise, melancholy, and playful, full lips parted almost against their will to reveal crooked teeth etched in gold, and fleshy arms encased in a satin dress trimmed in beads and sequins. Nearly a century later, rapper Lil' Kim rocked (and shocked) hip-hop audiences with her call girl's wardrobe of animal print thongs, pasties, and multicolored boas. If viewers understood the publicity-driven nature of Kim's outré album covers and interview photos, they were no doubt confounded by her shape-shifter image as a blue-eyed, platinum-blond black woman. As photographer Annie Leibovitz noted, “Sociologically [Kim] is really fascinating because she is not only dressing up to be a woman, but she's dressing up to be a white woman.”1 In the early 2000s, Nicki Minaj and Janelle Monáe brought a fresh look to popular culture with their idiosyncratic wardrobes. Hip-hop artist Minaj, outfitted in a collection of rainbow-hued wigs and fanciful clothing, challenged audiences to consider her unique sex appeal on her own terms, while rhythm and blues performer Monáe, clad in her signature outfit of tuxedo and saddle shoes, gave audiences a new perspective on what it means to “dress like a woman.” Along the way, Motown's Supremes introduced recherché sophistication to popular culture in the 1960s, making elbow-length gloves and evening gowns de rigueur in their performance wardrobe. Their target audience, driven in part by the marketing savvy of Berry Gordy, Motown's founder, was white women in their teen and early adult years who would embrace the romance of the group's glamorous demeanor.

Seeing Obama, Projecting Kennedy: The Presence of JFK in Images of Barack Obama

During the 2008 election campaign Obama’s youth, his glamorous wife, young children, and liberal politics resuscitated the memory of Kennedy, who remains the benchmark of the presidential image. This article explores how Obama shapes himself in Kennedy’s image. Employing Freud’s concept of the ‘ego-ideal’, the article examines how Obama has sought to establish himself as Kennedy’s natural successor through his presentation and performance. The article compares the representation of the two presidents in the works of Annie Leibovitz, Stanley Tretick, and Richard Avedon, as well as the documentaries and By the People (2009).

Evocative Imagery: Integrating Annie Leibovitz’s Women with Narratives about Work and Leadership

Research indicates that role models strongly influence career aspirations, and yet little is known about what young women draw from visual portrayals of work and leadership. In this study, we presented a collection of images to fifty young women, and we asked them to create a narrative essay discussing the meaning of the image and its relationship to their understanding of women, work, and leadership. The photographs were chosen from a collection titled “Women,” by Annie Leibovitz. Using a combination of photo elicitation and narrative analysis, we catalogued and categorized the photograph collection to analyze image selection. We explored which photographs were chosen and drew connections based on the narratives in the essays. The photos that were not selected were analyzed in order to understand why those photos were not seen to possess leadership qualities. Next, we analyzed the essays to identify emergent themes in the narratives. Our findings shed light on what influences and inspires women in defining work and leadership, and the implications of this for career theory.

After Weegee: essays on contemporary Jewish American photographers

Examining a range of styles from the gritty vernacular sensibility of Weegee (Arthur Fellig) to the glitzy theatricality of Annie Leibovitz, Morris takes a thoughtful look at ten American photographers, exploring the artists' often ambivalent relationships to their Jewish backgrounds. Going against the grain of most criticism on the subject, Morris argues that it is difficult to label Jewish American photographers as unequivocal outsiders or insiders with respect to mainstream American culture. He shows it is equally difficult to assign a characteristic style to such a varied group whose backgrounds range from self-taught photographers to those trained in art school. In eclectic ways, however, the contemporary photographers highlighted in After Weegee carry on the social justice and documentary tradition associated with Sid Grossman, Aaron Siskind, and the primarily Jewish Photo League of the 1930s by chronicling the downside of the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Rather than record movements or trends in current Jewish American photography, Morris focuses in-depth on the work of Bruce Davidson, Jim Goldberg, Mel Rosenthal, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Allen Ginsberg, Annie Leibovitz, Tyagan Miller, Aaron Siskind, and Marc Asnin. These photographers share a tendency toward socially informed expression and an interest in self-expression via the operations of photography, inevitably shaped by histories of socially conscious or documentary imaging. Moving between photo history, cultural history, and close readings of the images, Morris traces a common thread among contemporary secular Jewish American photographers, artists who link the construction of personal identity to the representation of history. After Weegee broadens our understanding of the relationship between Jewishness and contemporary photography, challenging us to take a fresh look at much of what has come to be canonized as modern, postwar, and art photography. Lucid, readable commentary on individual images-some familiar but refreshed by his reading; others less known and happily brought to light-and more particularly on the meaning of images as arrayed in photo-textual form.-Sara Blair, author of Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century

More Pregnant Pictures

In contemporary U.S. law and popular culture, it is a politically fraught act to convey what is in the pregnant belly. New York Magazine, in 2009, termed women's paintings of their fetuses on their own pregnant bellies “lowbrow” and “despicable.” Soon after, Dr. George Tiller was murdered for providing legal late term abortions that credited pregnant women's self-representations, and talk radio had difficulty condemning the shooter. Gonzales v Cathart (2007) supports this disdain for women's power to portray by suggesting that women do not have the ability correctly to judge the need to terminate their pregnancies, and might suffer crippling “abortion regret” after representing the fetus incorrectly.Photographs of pregnancy are also sites of cultural struggle. Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine broke a widespread taboo by representing Moore as a glamorous consumer of lifestyle choices, who had both a successful career and a family. This important image attributed feminine agency as well as glamour to Moore. It was greeted initially with widespread public outrage but rapidly became iconic as numerous others imitated the pose, including Bruce Willis and Leslie Nielsen, who parodied it as ersatz pregnant men.A second barrier was broken by pregnant transman Thomas Beatie, whose well-publicized images significantly queered the Demi Moore pose. Although Beatie himself is conservative on gender codes, his images shift the feminine—and feminist—configuration of the Demi Moore pose to a more heterogeneous configuration, hopefully helping to expand future gender rights and freedoms.

Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 (review)

Reviewed by: Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 Martin Meisel Joseph Roach , ed. Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 356. $75.00 (Hb). [End Page 112] The great thing about a festschrift for someone like Marvin Carlson is that it so readily lends itself to a retrospective look at a field during a time of radical transformation. Carlson's career overlays the whole modern development of Theatre Studies; his writings and his teaching kept pace with its unfolding, at some junctures pointing the way; and his students, many distinguished in their own right, are at hand to bear witness to the different stages and, not coincidentally, to Carlson's remarkable range. Carlson entered the field when it had a modest presence in Speech-Drama and Language and Literature departments and, otherwise, was still the province of devoted amateurs, meant in the best sense. But a rapprochement between theatre and drama studies — so obvious to us, so necessary — was in the works. (The life of this journal coincides with the dates in the title, and of course, like Carlson, it continues full blast.) "Changing the Subject" is the ingenious, multivalent headline for all this, and Roach's warm introduction offers a concentrated overview, tracing Carlson's trajectory, as scholar, teacher, and theatregoer, in parallel with that of the field. It also places the contributions of the other writers, mostly Carlson's former students, in relation to each other and to the assimilative metamorphoses of their mentor's interests and approaches. These ran from intrinsic and contextual history with a European focus, initially French and German; to the semiotics of the stage and then of the playhouse proper; to performance studies; to the phenomenology of memory, cognitive and cultural; to dramatic heteroglossia; to postmodern director's theatre; to Arabic-speaking theatre. There are fourteen essays in the book, apart from Roach's introduction and afterword, and a charming, rueful, and perfectly tuned preface by Paula Vogel on her experience of Carlson as a teacher: exemplary in himself, shaping the raw materials of passion and intelligence with a benign and artful hand. Doug Peterson's piece extends this perspective anecdotally through the turmoil of the late sixties and the emergence of a "radical pedagogy." A few of the essays that follow seem caught in time, and more than a few exemplify a facet or a phase of Carlson's interests or gracefully tie their subject to a particular book. His Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (2001) appears to have particular traction, notably in Eszter Szalczer's "The Case of Strindberg's Modernity," which — apart from its bow to Carlson's long engagement with the great modern innovators of the North — offers an excellent close reading of The Ghost Sonata. The Haunted Stage also percolates through Gay Gibson Cima's "Speaking of Human Trafficking," focused primarily on two "performative" events: one, a bicentennial commemoration, involving Queen Elizabeth II, of Britain's ending its slave trade, which echoed a celebration a hundred years earlier under Queen Victoria; the other, appearances on London lecture platforms, in the year of the earlier celebration and just days [End Page 113] apart, of the African American abolitionist Sarah Redmond and the pro-slavery advocate, the flamboyant Lola Montez. Striking and revelatory is Cima's deployment of visual materials, notably portraits of Queen Charlotte, George III's reputedly mixed-race consort, and Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Elizabeth II. In one of the best pieces in the book, David Savran also invokes Carlson's ghosting trope in putting the case for serious attention to musical theatre, so snobbishly ignored in academic scholarship and curricula until recently. He lays down the criteria for its serious study, as well as identifying the difficulties, and exposes the flimsiness of the "evolutionary romance" that prevails as the received history (226). Best of all, he gives an account of the Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin/Moss Hart collaboration, Lady in the Dark, as an example of what can be done, alert to its barometric immersion in contemporary cultural and social politics (Carlson's "contextualization," with grace notes...

Hide/Seek: difference and desire in American portraiture

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, a survey of portrait art by and about lesbian and gay artists, ably addresses questions of disclosure and revelation in the work of twentieth-century artists. The book was published to accompany the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery exhibit of the same name (October 2010 to February 2011); besides the visual delight of seeing works by some of this country’s most acclaimed artists, the exhibit and book unveil and decode the contributions of lesbian and gay artists to American modernism, offering a new way of thinking about American portraiture of the past hundred years. One of the ways in which a society invalidates the experience, and even the lives, of its marginalized members is by obscuring or destroying the history and stories of those lives. Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward show how American society has attempted to do so with the history and stories of the lesbian and gay community, creating a situation in which its members are seen as “other,” and demonized for their difference. Especially moving is the Annie Leibovitz photographic portrait of Ellen DeGeneres, a study at once conflicted and beautiful in its “carnival of visual signs.” Coming out, said DeGeneres, was a freeing experience, “because people can’t hurt me anymore.” Authors Katz and Ward bring these stories to light and return them to the history of American art and culture, thus enriching it by calling it to recognize, if not yet wholly embrace, all of its members. They say of Walt Whitman in his time that, “It was Whitman’s essence as a gay man that allowed him to ask American democracy to fulfill its promise.” This important and compelling work demands the same of our country today. It goes a long way toward restoring the history, narrative, and legacy of artists who, in spite of being marginalized, have made lasting contributions to American art and culture. Katz founded and directed the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and is director of the Visual Studies doctoral program at SUNY–Buffalo. Ward is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, and the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. He is also a poet and critic. KRISTINE MORRIS (October 16, 2010)

Why Does Mickey Rourke Give Pleasure?

“‘You’re going to do everything I say, you’re going to do everything I tell you, and you’re never going to disrespect me in front of the crew. . . . And I can’t pay you.’”1 Pimp to ho? Frankenstein to monster? Or indie director to fallen bad-boy star? Mickey Rourke loved to tell the story of his degradation at the hands of Darren Aronofsky while making The Wrestler (2008). He left no doubt that he was the bottom, there to be beaten up, stapled, gigged, and sent to the hospital between takes. The dynamic was captured in Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of the sadistic director and his battered muse, Aronofsky bursting from his cheaplooking suit, his close-cropped hair and mustache that screamed masculinity crisis, his confrontation with the camera, and Rourke crouching in the background— half-naked, long-haired, smoking, bruised, and tattooed—as though there was nothing left to do to him. He looked like a boxer in his corner—a pornographic, existential boxer wearing tight jeans and velvet shoes (fig. 1). The photograph appeared in the wake of Leibovitz’s bare-backed portrait of Miley Cyrus, and satirists joked that she had taken advantage of Rourke, too, that there would be