Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Through May 20

“For Annie Leibovitz, putting icons front and center is nothing new,” said Sophie Gilbert in Washingtonian. But the famed celebrity photographer wasn’t on assignment when she made a recent journey across America and to Europe to visit places and objects touched by various of her dead heroes—Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, and Ansel Adams among them. The photographs she created, now on view at the Smithsonian, present “a veritable cabinet of wonders”—“from the television Elvis Presley shot in a fit of pique to the gloves and hat Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated.” Though no human figures appear in the images, Leibovitz’s “laser-sharp” eye allows her to “zoom in on the things that are most representative of their owners.” Their ghosts are so present that many of these 64 photographs will send shivers up your spine.

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Actually, the entire collection left me cold, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. As a portraitist to the rich and famous, Leibovitz has always produced pictures that present the world “not as it really is” but glamorized to such a degree that they shut out the also-rans in America’s “winner-take-all system.” Most of the images here are no different. When Leibovitz shows us the couch from Sigmund Freud’s Vienna office, or even Thoreau’s humble bed at Walden Pond, the objects themselves feel “more real, closer, more textured and sensuous than anything found in real life.” She makes herself seem a privileged inhabitant of the elite realm her lens captures, granted an intimacy with “Georgia” or “Ansel” that we mere mortals can never attain. A different photographer might have displayed some skepticism about the subset of the tourism industry that’s built around celebrity relics. Leibovitz merely feeds the same impulse that sells glossy magazines—our “restless appetite to feel close to famous people.”