Annie Leibovitz Research Articles

Review: No, Not Gone with the Wind

Review: No, Not Gone with the Wind1 Ma Ángeles Cabré Translated by Cindy Sheffield Michaels and Estefania Olid-Pena Welty, Eudora. Cuentos completos (Collected Stories). Barcelona: Lumen, 2009. Do you know of an email client named Eudora? It was developed in the late 1980s at the University of Illinois by Steve Dorner. He had read a short story by Eudora Welty entitled “Why I Live at the P. O.,” which narrates the story of a woman who decides to abandon her family to live at her workplace. As a tribute to this short story, Dorner named his program after the author who—it is said—was very honored. In a time when almost no one reads literature but reads instead computer spam and other subterfuges to kill boredom, Eudora Welty still remains in the annals of modernity. Almost no one knows that this short story gave a new dimension to Welty and solidified her status as a writer. “Why I Live at the P. O.” appeared in the first book she published, A Curtain of Green. Some of her stories were published in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1936.2 With A Curtain of Green she achieved notoriety thanks in part to the already recognized Texas short-story writer, Katherine Anne Porter. Porter would become Welty’s mentor and even offered to write the preface to A Curtain of Green to give Welty some publicity. In the 1950s, Welty abandoned her previous career3 as a photographer and immersed herself in the process of writing. In this way she became part of the heaven of Southern authors of which, without a doubt, Faulkner was the God. From a current perspective, Welty with Porter, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor are considered the feminine quartet who established the basis of American realistic stories. Now that we have passed the [2009] centenary anniversary of the birth of this lady of letters, we can say that Welty is present with us in two ways. Her collected stories are published for the first time in Spain. Welty’s godmother’s stories [Porter’s] have already been published by Lumen. This is a reason to celebrate; the only deficiency is many of its pages are difficult to read. Additionally, Welty’s portrait was shown in Annie Leibovitz’s [End Page 139] acclaimed exhibition, seen last month [September 2009] in Madrid. This portrait shows Welty, already in her 90s, smiling with a sly brilliance in her look that may be considered an emblem of the curiosity with which she contemplated the daily life of her native South. She saw life, at first, from behind the camera lenses, then with a fountain pen in hand. In fact, the Museum of the City of New York is currently showing4 a selection of her photographs of the Great Depression. Although this selection is in line with the photojournalistic documentation of Dorothea Lange, Lange’s work is weak in comparison. In relation to her stories, Welty has been considered a writer whose stories are individually widely varied; therefore, one is pleased to read a collection of her short narratives side-by-side. Collected Stories compiles the short stories from her books: A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and two other stories that had not been previously gathered. In addition to writing short stories, Welty wrote novels. With La hija del optimista / The Optimist’s Daughter (now published by Impedimenta) she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, a prize that Porter had obtained some years before and that was granted to the writer Elizabeth Strout last year. Welty also wrote literary criticism and, in 1983, she published an autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, which has been translated here with the title of La palabra heredada (Montesinos). We are not trying to say that her work was barely known in her circles; the talented Truman Capote admired Welty for her short stories. Her success as a writer seldom goes beyond the geographic borders of the place where she was born and raised. She is a writer who, engrained in her...

Hannah Montana’s Bare, Unprotected Back: Miley Cyrus’s <i>Vanity Fair</i> Outing

ere we go again: another kid we have made into a centerfold and tell ourselves is merely “cute” (as if there were a “merely” there). She follows our undercover instructions, tarts herself up for public consumption, and now takes the heat for doing as she’s told. This time it’s Miley Cyrus, subject of some photos, the most recent by the canny (and smarmy) Annie Leibovitz in June 2008’s Vanity Fair. The photo in question shows a heavily madeup Cyrus, then fifteen, hair messy, eyes droopy, clutching a sheet to her chest as she faces us from the side, flashing (gasp) bare shoulders and full back. The possibility exists— you care, right?—that she is topless, maybe bottomless, maybe even shoeless—who can know for sure? Some feel (and many have said) that she looks as if she had just had sex or something equally unthinkable for a fifteen year old (which explains why we think it). Others say, c’mon, get over it, she’s only doing what kids enjoy doing, get a life, leave her alone. I side with the second group, I guess, though I can’t but wonder why so much attention is being paid. Hey, I went on one site inviting comments—I am a responsible scholar and figured I should inform myself—and blithely set the printer to running. I found myself, 347 pages later, with a couple of thousand gems like this:

Annie Leibovitz's Queer Consumption of Motherhood

The photographer Annie Leibovitz, chronicler of American life for thirty-five years, has created many of the images that people our collective unconscious: countercultural images in the 1970s when she traveled with the Beades for Rolling Stone to controversial covers for Vanity Fair. She has chronicled her generation's passage through society and every other generation's as well. In the process, she has pushed limits and broken taboos, and she has destabilized notions of the beautiful, the outre, and the poignant. The point here is that she has not only photographed American culture but also changed it - that is, shifted the line between what is considered acceptable and unacceptable. Her genius lies in capturing the images that in retrospect are viewed as iconic: of Allen Ginsburg smoking joint, of naked John Lennon wrapped in fetal fashion around Yoko Ono hours before his death, of the actress Demi Moore naked and cradling her pregnant belly. last, cover for Vanity Fair in 1991, was almost pulled by then-editor Tina Brown; and while some newsstands wrapped the issue in opaque cellophane to protect the public's sensibilities, others refused to sell it. Eventually, the image won prize from the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2005 for second-best cover from the past forty years (the first prize went to the Lennon image). signature ability to shock and then change the public's sensibilities has made Leibovitz daring moral and aesthetic pioneer even while she continues to be controversial.1 The subject matter of this essay is Leibovitz 's traveling exhibit and her based on the exhibit, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 and, in particular, her representation of her own belated motherhood. The exhibit opened in Brooklyn; traveled to San Francisco, where saw it in 2008 at the Legion of Honor and then moved on to London and Paris. Leibovitz has typically shocked the public using other people's bodies; in this exhibit and she also used her own ageing body to discomfit if not outright shock her viewers - in particular through dramatic images of her postmidlife (PM) cooptation of motherhood. use the acronym PM, which is deliberately ambiguous; it can stand not only for postmidlifebut also for post(peri)menopausal. It is meant to suggest the crossing over of natural boundary. The photos of the exhibit, Leibovitz notes in her introduction to the book, span the years of her relationship with the writer and critic Susan Sontag. Their relationship was mostly closeted - in the sense that Sontag and Leibovitz never referred to themselves as lovers, or as lesbians. Indeed, both refused labels other than the one of friend.2 In this book, Leibovitz again insists on the word friend and thus on ambiguity; yet some of the photos seem to depict their relationship as unambiguously intimate. The book, Leibovitz notes in her introduction, is a beauty book that gestated in conversation with Sontag. It does contain images of surreal beauty: of timeless landscapes in Jordan and Egypt, for instance, which, notably, she visited with Sontag. It also contains the famous images from Leibovitz's professional portfolio: Hollywood actresses and bionic athletes captured in their moment of incandescent youth and indelible images of the seemingly larger-than-life moguls, entertainers, and politicians of our era. Interspersed with these iconic images - blown up in the exhibit - are small, ostensibly private, family photos: black-and-white images of Leibovitz's large extended family of origin, as well as great many of Sontag, in bed with typewriter, on vacation, enduring chemotherapy, and dying; the photos of her dying are juxtaposed with images of the births of Leibovitz's daughters, by which time Leibovitz was in her fifties. I don't have two lives, Leibovitz explains in her introduction. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it. …

Cancer Narratives and an Ethics of Commemoration: Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz, and David Rieff

Cancer Narratives and an Ethics of Commemoration: Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz, and David Rieff

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005

The Annie Leibovitz exhibit has elicited many responses around the world. I invite you to follow the links to a number of interesting websites, articles and slideshows, before allowing me to use this Parisian event as an excuse to comment on a photograph that did not make the cut, as it predates the period encompassed by the exhibit. It is a portrait entitled “Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk”. Annie Leibovitz’ autobiographical retrospective exhibit “A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005” was ori...

Street & studio: a urban history of photography

Any examination of the history of the photographic portrait uncovers two very different traditions, shaped by the place where they were made - in the street or in the studio. Both are essentially urban. The street has been the place where small and easily concealed cameras allowed photographers to capture subjects unaware or at least in informal settings. In contrast, the studio offered both photographer and subjects the opportunity to present carefully composed images to the world, making use of all the elaborate staging and technical tricks at their disposal. Both these practices have since been subverted, with celebrities becoming used to posing in the street and the studio being used for informal and intimate shots. For the first time this book examines the contrasts and tensions between these two traditions, revealing much about the history of photography itself and providing fascinating insights into the changing face of societies across the globe.The book will include many of the greatest names in the history of photography. Among those who have famously photographed in the street, it will feature work by Atget, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Araki, Boris Mikhailov and Wolfgang Tillmans. Studio-based photographers include Carlo Ponti, Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Annie Leibovitz, Jurgen Teller, and Rineke Dijkstra. Essays by leading critics examine the history of street and studio photography and how the images these photographers have produced has conditioned the way we see both the modern city and ourselves.

Being in Pictures, An Intimate Photo Memoir byJoanne Leonard

Reviewed by: Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir Ruth Zoë Ost (bio) Joanne Leonard ; Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (University of Michigan Press, 2008) When young photographers ask me what they should do first, I always tell them to stay close to home. —Annie Leibovitz, A Photographer's Life Decades ago, back in my Ann Arbor days, a former student, long since a friend, asked if I would mind if she took my photos, squirreled away in shoeboxes, and put them in albums. My life in disorder upset her. Looking through those beautifully arranged albums, I loved her for the story she told, yet grieved for the one she missed. Pictures conflicting with her version of who I was ended up hidden behind more acceptable truths. I didn't rearrange them, though I prowled around, looking for what was missing and found them stashed away but saved. These albums frame my relationship with Joanne Leonard's Being in Pictures, An Intimate Photo Memoir.1 In Joanne Leonard's twin tellings through text and pictures (a twin herself, twinning is a theme in her work, a way she thinks about identity), she has, in effect, curated her own life: a one-woman retrospective, text on the white walls of high-gloss paper, her own captions. We can hold this volume, lay it across our laps, keep company with her: she invites a subversive relationship with the reader/viewer, out from under the patriarchal gaze. Click for larger view View full resolution I open her book, familiar with Leonard's [End Page 161] important work as an artist and a feminist, her intimate documentaries canonized with the inclusion of Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal in Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition. I can't put it down. How is she thinking about intimacy or fatality in this new format? Is the intimate dangerous? What does the gaze make of the work of the most ordinary, personal, and complicated of relationships: sisters (twin sisters in Leonard's case, doubling the complexities), mother and daughter, father and daughter, husband (later ex-husband) and lover(s), and close friends? Who counts? The counting begins with the dedication: "To Julia Marjorie Leonard, my beloved and dazzling daughter"—and concludes: Where does a mother's story end and a daughter's begin? That might be, after all, the central question of this book, the point of the autobiographical approach I've taken in putting this book together—to discover the lives in my own images, to remember the stories of my mother, to give the stories to my daughter, and to anyone else for whom these ideals and themes resonate. p. 240 This issue of Bridges is about Jewish feminists' relationships with their fathers. Why include a review of this book, then, when Leonard is trying to collage/memoir her way into making sense of the relationships between mothers and daughters—indeed, the matriarchy across the generations? I prowl around the pictures and text, invited in by the very premise of collage—scraps of handwritten text, photos, snapshots, cut-outs, blood-stained paper patched and pasted together, layers through which to draw and make meaning.2 What stories does she need to find in her images? What stories does her daughter need—feminist, Jewish, or otherwise? Engaging in her images and text from the perspective of the father hints at a missing story, exposes the haunting negative: men. For a photographer whose work predates digital images, "negative" can have multiple meanings: film needing to be held to the light to see what's there, maybe to be printed, maybe not; and the opposite of positive, something negative, against the good, against desire. Leonard's relationship with men, especially her father, her (ex-) husband, the lover who is the father of her child: I hold them to the light to see what I've missed. I want to explore these negative images as a way to explore the generational shift from Joanne Leonard's feminism to the desires of her own daughter. Leonard's narrative gains traction as it distances itself from patriarchal relations. Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal, the cover photo for this book...

Women, Trauma, and Late Modernity: Sontag, Duras, and Silence in Cinema, 1960–1980

Women, Trauma, and Late Modernity:Sontag, Duras, and Silence in Cinema, 1960–1980 E. Ann Kaplan (bio) Absolute Subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort of silence (Shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida My interest in late modernism has to do with it being the end of an era that, especially in post–World War II Europe, spawned a generation of artists reflecting a new sensibility touched by trauma—as experienced through devastating events such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and colonialism. The deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in 2007 and that of Alain Robbe-Grillet in February 2008 ( Jacques Rivette marked his eightieth birthday at the same time) underscore the passing of a late modernist generation that greatly influenced Susan Sontag and to which Marguerite Duras belonged. Since her death, Sontag has gained a focus and attention from leading women critics and academics hitherto lacking (and I include myself here). If Sontag was not a particularly easy person, she did not deserve the memoir (touched by envy) that Terry Castle wrote in 2005, nor did she deserve the well-known critique by Susan Wiseman that was, I argue, mistaken.1 In general there is now a renewed interest in understanding Sontag's life and work—this especially in light of her last years when she lived with Annie Leibovitz, and of Leibovitz's extraordinary photos of Sontag dying. I want to bring attention to Sontag's little-known 1970s films, and to situate her in her sociocultural context as a case study along with Duras. The two women, now dead, represent a particular historical 1970s feminist moment in regard to women in film and to a particular set of differing interests relating to silence and its aesthetics (still relevant today), both of which warrant study. Both [End Page 158] women were writers and filmmakers and both share Sontag's notion (as illuminated, among other ideas, in her long essay, "The Aesthetics of Silence") that "modern art . . . transmits in full the alienation produced by historical consciousness." Where traditional art, Sontag notes, invites a look, "art that is silent engenders a stare."2 My focus here is this very silence, used as a strategy by these two artists (Duras from France, Sontag from the United States, and each aware of the other), to achieve specific ends and specific responses relevant to late modernism. Their confluence and their juxtaposition in this period reveal provocative aspects of their work not necessarily otherwise visible. The contrast also reminds us of what we too readily forget, namely that on the cusp of the woman's movement, different theorizations of woman in patriarchy prevailed on each side of the Atlantic due to the contrasting intellectual traditions and methods of analysis in the United States and France. I choose the issues relating to an aesthetics of silence because silence, along with anti-narrative strategies, was a pervasive trope in late modernism, as can be seen in artists like Samuel Beckett, Antonioni, and Bergman, to name only the most obvious. However, both Duras and Sontag utilize this aesthetic in ways different from their male peers—ways that reveal their concerns specifically as women in patriarchal society. If my glance back to the 1970s has a nostalgic tinge to it, so be it. In a sense this essay is dedicated to remembering what we have lost in the deaths of two female pioneers. It also aims to resituate aspects of their art through the contemporary lens of "affect" and trauma theory. Duras used silence as an element of darkness and saw darkness as an inevitable metaphor for women. Her conception of the darkness from which women wrote was related to a position that saw signs of society's death everywhere. Women's way of writing, she argued, exploded the terrifying emptiness and illusion of bourgeois consciousness and male language. As Xavière Gauthier puts it, Duras's books "do the work of mining; they mine from below."3 For the Duras of this period (she later abandoned her somewhat utopian position), silence and passivity were the only ways in which women could be themselves. She did not...

The Emergence of Audience as Victims

The Emergence of Audience as Victims

High Regard: Words and Pictures in Tribute to Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag s death on December 28, 2004, was marked, unsurprisingly, by an immediate outpouring of thoughtful memoirs and obituaries. Turning from words to pictures, surprising tributes came later: Annie Leibovitz's Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, and last year's Metropolitan Museum of Art show, On Photography: Tribute to Susan Sontag, which ran from June 6 to September 4, 2006. Leibovitz's book opens with a picture of Sontag, back to camera, dwarfed by rock walls of Petra but emerging into white open space before temple. Leibovitz explains that she came across photograph while searching through her files for pictures to include in a booklet she was making for Sontag's memorial service. Encountering pictures she had taken in their fifteen years together, Leibovitz ended up with a book in addition to memorial booklet. Although book follows time line implied by title, with her opening picture, Leibovitz breaks chronology for Sontag's sake. She justifies exception by explaining that the picture sounds themes of death and grief that wind through book, but it also captures Sontag's appetite for experience.1 Metropolitan Museum curator Mia Fineman in turn visited Leibovitz's studio before book was finished and chose this same photograph to include as last image to exhibit (fig.l). (Leibovitz donated it to museum.)2 In contrast to Leibovitz's factual caption (Susan Sontag, Petra, Jordan, 1994) and intimate narrative, wall text in Metropolitan's exhibition gives theory: A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of vanished past are incitements to reverie. Quoted from Sontag's On Photography? this wall text, like all texts in exhibit, was selected by curator Fineman from Sontag's repertoire of writings on photography.

An Economic Analysis of the Fair Use Defense in Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corporation

In Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp., the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined whether the use of a copyrighted photograph of pregnant actress Demi Moore constituted fair use.3 The plaintiff, Annie Leibovitz, is a well-known photographer whose works often depict celebrities in uncommon poses. One of her most recognized works appeared on the cover of the August 1991 issue of the monthly magazine, Vanity Fair. The work depicted the nude, preg-