Luke Judge

WHEN Annie Leibovitz’s second important retrospective went to the National Portrait Gallery in London, after its initial showing at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006, some younger viewers were disappointed. Too much of the photographer’s family, not enough celebrity, was the verdict from those who, as Leibovitz’s partner, Susan Sontag, once wrote, consume photography as the “quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies”.

A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, which opens next week at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, is, in fact, a long, anguished homage to Sontag. The writer’s death from cancer at the end of 2004, followed by the death a few weeks later of Leibovitz’s father, precipitated the organisation of 15 years of work which, she says in the book also called A Photographer’s Life, took her through “the grieving process”.

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“It’s the closest thing to who I am that I’ve ever done,” she says.

Leibovitz’s fame is, in part, a matter of timing. She was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960s, thinking to be a painter but moving across to photography, “a faster medium”, which she believed “helped socialise me”.

It was easier to be social in the 60s, even for introverted thoughtful types: there were issues galvanising young people in passionate groups. Leibovitz’s first photographs to be published were of anti-Vietnam war rallies and they appeared in the “relatively young, flexible” magazine Rolling Stone.

She first photographed John Lennon in 1970 for Rolling Stone, getting the gig because she could fly to New York on a youth fare and stay with friends, costing the magazine less. Ten years later, she took that photograph of a naked Lennon curled around a clothed Yoko Ono hours before he was shot dead.

You’d hesitate to call this lucky, but the timing – and the oddness of that image – are sufficient to ensure Leibovitz’s place in the annals of photography.

The photograph of Demi Moore eight months pregnant and naked appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 and thus falls into the period covered in this exhibition. In Annie Leibovitz at Work, a book published in 2008, the photographer recalls, with surprise, how “truly scandalous” this was, but says it was never her intention to shock.

She talks about what cameras she uses, enthuses about the potential of digital, describes how she works to set up a shoot (which she has been engaged on this week, putting off several times doing brief interviews to publicise the MCA show), but there is no Leibovitz manifesto, per se, no credo about the role or function or ethics of photography, at least not in Leibovitz’s words. The manifesto was written by her lover, Sontag, before the two extraordinary women even met.

In On Photography, published in 1973 when the young Leibovitz was starting out behind her hero, Richard Avedon, at Rolling Stone, Sontag analysed the history of photography with brilliant, provocative clarity. She called photographs “knowledge at bargain prices” and an “aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted”. She traced the way the great American poet Walt Whitman’s humanistic desire to “generalise beauty” had “gone sour”, as one after the other America’s visionary photographers gradually succumbed to what Sontag calls the surrealist impulse.

The apotheosis of that impulse was, according to Sontag, the work of Diane Arbus, who killed herself in 1971. (Coincidently the same year Avedon photographed his dying father, a then outrageous act that prefigured Leibovitz’s disturbing photographs of her father on his deathbed and Sontag, a body exhausted from its terrible last months.)

Sontag distinguished between the activity of a writer (which may not be willed) and that of the photographer, which was always a choice. And it was the “lowering of the threshold of what is terrible” by photographing the poor, the maimed, the hopeless, with which Sontag took issue.

She disapproved of Arbus’s belief the camera “annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed”.

The amoral lust to show and look at what was “private, hidden, ugly, dangerous and fascinating” grew, she said, out of modernism’s rejection of aesthetic hierarchies. Sontag’s rejection of “America as a freak show” led both her and Leibovitz to begin thinking about a project they would call The Beauty Book (cut short by Sontag’s final illness), and there is much in this retrospective, Leibovitz says, that comes out of that idea.

Whether they are photographs that will remain in the public eye as long or as fixedly as Nicole Kidman’s cold-eyed, self-conscious stare, or Arnold Schwarzenegger astride a stallion as absurdly sturdy as he, is a question for the future. And whether Sontag, who was writing her novel The Volcano Lover and the final analytical essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, during the time documented in A Photographer’s Life, will remain in print (or in e-book classics catalogues) is also uncertain. “Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalising our relation to the world: and the two uses are complementary,” Sontag wrote in 1973.

In this exhibition, it is as though Leibovitz, once she met the writer, was haunted by that warning. Sontag was not against photography but her analytical skill was constantly applied to this relatively new invention, not quite art but also more than art.

Sontag used the word magic and discussed how it was the freezing of a moment that conferred this magic on almost any photograph, however amateur, whatever equipment was used. Leibovitz says mostly photography is work, but that magic is what makes it transcendent.

Leibovitz says she edited the book of A Photographer’s Life with Sontag in mind, as though she were looking at it in exactly the way her companion would have done. The exhibition coming to Sydney flows from an image of Sontag in the often-photographed chasm between rocks at Petra in Jordan. Reclaiming this tourist site, she then sets about to reclaim the family snapshot, as more than sentiment and less than documentation. The most haunting images in the context of the exhibition are likely to be the hazy, almost abstract landscapes, beautiful but uncertain. Sontag is present there, too, in her absence.

A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on November 19.

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