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

last updated 8 January 2015

'œApparently, it is time for Annie Leibovitz's close-up,' said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Like Richard Avedon before her, Leibovitz has become famous for photographing famous people, and celebrity portraits are certainly the main attraction at the Brooklyn Museum of Art's exhibition of her recent work. But they're nearly outnumbered by photographs of the artist's family and other intimate relations. The witty commercial works capture 'œa heady mix of intimacy and posturing, elaborated, like paintings of saints, by recognizable attributes.' Demi Moore poses pregnant and naked. Donald Trump shows off his private jet and brand-new trophy wife. Jim Carrey contorts his rubbery face into a howl. The more personal works however are shockingly bland. Not at all museum-worthy, they at times reduce the exhibition to little more than 'œan unconscious exercise in ego gratification.'

You could take pictures as good as these, said Ariella Budick in Newsday. No one can deny that pictures of Leibovitz's dying parents or her late partner Susan Sontag are heart-rending. But artistically, they're negligible. 'œIt's refreshing to see what Leibovitz can do without fancy lighting and a retinue of assistants—except that the answer turns out to be: nothing much.' Unfortunately, the inclusion of such starkly realistic snapshots only emphasizes the extreme artificiality of the celebrity portraits. Where Avedon had a knack for capturing unexpected elements of his subjects' personalities, Leibovitz tends merely to echo their inflated self-images. You can't shake the feeling she's 'œselling famous people like expensive perfume.'

Speak for yourself, said Carl Rollyson in The New York Sun. Many portraits are more ironic than they first appear. Leibovitz shows us Nicole Kidman, a megawatt movie star wrapped in a swirling gown and showered with shimmering light. But she also shows us the spotlights used to create the effect. 'œYou can practically wrap quotation marks around the composition, as if the photographer is both paying homage to portraits of Hollywood goddesses and sending them up.' Sontag, in fact, wrote extensively and skeptically about the ways photographers create their illusions, and so 'œbecame a kind of cantankerous muse to Ms. Leibovitz.' In that sense the celebrity portraits, as much as the personal ones, testify to these two women's remarkable relationship.