Major museum retrospectives often lead to a reevaluation of an artist’s body of work.  Naturally, this type of show invites particular scrutiny if the artist being shown is the preeminent commercial photographer of the time. Some might ask why enjoying such extraordinary success should necessarily lead to a major museum retrospective. While some feel that commercial photography is out of place in an environment more properly dedicated to Fine Art, few amongst the hordes of people that I encountered one Saturday afternoon at the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum would complain.

The show provided a chance to see her work en masse, and outside the context of a magazine, making it easier to take a metaphorical step back and ask exactly what it is that she has accomplished as a photographer - a question that is ordinarily short-circuited by the obvious answer that she works for Vogue when she isn’t taking pictures of A-list celebrities for Vanity Fair.

Mixed in with the magazine work are personal pictures of the photographer’s parents, her children, her partner Susan Sontag and a number of pictures from their trips to Sarajevo. The small size of the non-commercial prints forces the viewer to peer at an image so as to make out what is going on in the frame, which makes it hard to compare the two types of work. Was the decision to print the personal work so small a subconscious admission as to its relative merit?

The exhibit is accompanied by a few well chosen quotes written beneath the pictures. In one we learn that Sontag frequently observed that Leibovitz took far fewer personal pictures than the other photographers in their acquaintance. Being of the opinion that Annie Leibovitz has become such a commanding commercial photographer, in part, because she has had so much practice, it occurred to me that the reverse might be true for her personal work.

Many of these pictures are as banal as anyone else’s family pictures. They are casual, unremarkable compositions. However urban and atypical the photographer’s domestic arrangements, they document an ordinary looking family in ordinary circumstances: a group picture, swimming in the ocean, playing on the beach. These are punctuated by an intermittent arty flourish. As if in response to Sontag’s admonition to break out the camera, Leibovitz snaps four successive pictures of Sontag sitting next to her in a car - in Arizona for what that’s worth - repeating more or less the same frame four times. The results are printed as a grid. Another grid depicts her elderly parents in bed, but this is enlivened by the final quadrant, in which her father, sitting on the far side of the bed, turns to the camera with a look that seems to ask why, at this particular moment, his daughter should choose to make him the subject of a goddamn picture.

There are three family images that have the same strength as the magazine work. Two are pictures of Leibovitz’s daughter, who, it just so happens, is just as lovely as any of the movie stars in the exhibition. The color image entitled Sarah Cameron Leibovitz is a statement about the photographer’s daughter’s intense blue eyes, rather than a family snapshot.  What results is an iconic image rather than documentation of an intimate, personal moment. The black and white image of S.C.L. entitled October 16 2004 again gives no indication as to time or place and has the same iconic strength.

By far and away the most powerful image of the personal work is an image of Susan Sontag assembled from a number of Polaroid pictures joined together in segments like an accordion, so as to make a wide, horizontal image. This may have been prompted by the difficulty of taking a picture in a very confined space, but the resulting composition evokes the length of her body laid out in front of the camera very effectively, proceeding from the quick-witted evaluation that somehow the length of the body would convey a sense of the shock felt when confronted by the shell of a loved one: the terrible sense of the corporeal absent spirit.

Annie Leibovitz’s best work is extremely articulate in just this sort of way, making use of the characteristics and, in a sense, limitations of the techniques at her disposal, so as to accent the salient physical characteristics of what is in front of her. This requires extraordinary clarity of purpose, and responsiveness to the situation, especially as this decision-making is often in response to something ephemeral. The picture of Mark Morris from 1988 is one example. His eyes are so much the center of attention the viewer might easily assume that any photographer on meeting Mark Morris would inevitably feel compelled to concentrate on them. Having photographed him myself in 1992, I can attest that this is not the case.

Leibovitz is hardly the only photographer who is responsive to the way that light breaks across her subject in a particular place, at any given moment, and the way that this accents one feature rather than another.  However, she is extremely fleet of foot in response to many other factors as well. Composition is another of her great strengths. The term is often used almost disparagingly to mean a pleasing visual arrangement – a sort of prettifying of the world – but it’s much more than that: it’s how you frame what is in front of you to say what you want to say about it.  

A black and white image of Leigh Bowery in black bondage attire is an example of Leibovitz’s astuteness in composition. The image, made from a Polaroid negative, incorporates the black cards which are used to prevent light spilling into the camera, their blackness echoing the intense and sinister blackness of the figure, while also boxing it in. This demonstrates alertness as to the tools the photographer has at hand and how they may be incorporated in the frame to amplify what is being said about the main subject. The ability to see one thing in terms of another, a related skill, is at work in the photograph of an F-117 Nighthawk, which is strikingly reminiscent of Darth Vader’s helmet.

Leibovitz’s magazine work often gives off an intensity of purpose. She still seems to be searching to find the key to unlock each individual assignment, not knowing from which direction the solution is going to come. As I made my way through the show, it seemed to me that this striving has only intensified in recent years, and it is the earlier work which has a higher frequency of images that, if not exactly complacent, fail to achieve any originality in her approach to the subject. It also occurred to me that the lack of the personal work might boil down to a reluctance to subject her personal life to the rigor of this kind of process.

The majority of the black and white pictures from magazine assignments included in the show were made from Polaroid negatives (In the pre digital era Polaroid pictures were used to check the lighting before shooting film, and then after any significant change in the set-up: in lighting, costume, setting etc. A print made from a Polaroid negative produced by a medium format camera, is distinguished by a relatively large amount of black space around the image area and the distressed looking border running around the edge of the frame.) It is not unusual to make prints from Polaroid negatives (although her prints are of exceptional quality), but what is significant is that Leibovitz chose to represent so many of the studio assignments in the exhibition with a print made from a Polaroid negative rather than from the abundance of frames of film that must have been shot during the same session. I think there is a clue to this in another quote written on the wall:

I’m not a great studio portraitist. At best, my studio photographs are graphic. I can always fall back on composition. I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me. On the other hand, when you strip everything away it’s terrifying. It’s just you and another person.

A Polaroid picture taken at the beginning of a session can sometimes have an immediacy and freshness that gets smoothed out by the repetitive process of shooting frame after frame of film, even if a portrait becomes more perfect and, in a sense, stronger as you keep working. The tendency to over-perfect is one that Leibovitz has always needed to resist. We see it in the color portrait of Daniel Day Lewis from 1992, which in pose and finish makes me think of a painted portrait of a cavalry officer from 1792; the photo is beautifully executed, but also as lifeless. The same can be said for the portraits of General Colin Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf from 1991. They are like an opulent, class photo: garish and unrevealing, communicating nothing except that these are men of importance. It’s depressing to see a former rock and roll photographer apparently becoming such a cheerleader for the establishment.

The portrait of Bill Clinton in the Oval office - another from the earlier years covered by the exhibition - also seems to be lacking any artistic purpose. It’s instructive to compare it to work shot more recently in an indoor setting. Even when it is dramatic, her current work is lit so as to look more believable, which is to say, from above. In this portrait, the President is side-lit, and the background is illuminated almost as brightly as he is, as if protocol didn’t allow anything as gloomy as a shadow into the frame. Nowadays the photographer would allow the light to ‘fall off’ with the result that there would be a gradation in tonality, unlike the flat, uniform, beige that we see in this photograph. The film is also more granular now and, as a result, the images do not look like they have rendered the scene in plastic. But these aren’t merely cosmetic improvements; rather it is a refinement in conception, a discovery of narrative. Nowadays the subject is a character in the story suggested by the setting, even if the subject is performing a version of him/herself.  In contrast, the photograph of Bill Clinton is no more than an official representation.

On the same wall as portraits of the generals, is a color portrait of Kate Moss and Johnny Depp. A clothed Johnny lies on top of, and hence masks, Kate’s unclothed body. The mis-en-scene implies that the photographer walked in on them while they were going at it, but the photograph lacks any of the grit which serves to authenticate tabloid pictures or celebrity porn flicks; the action is overtly staged. Is this poor judgment, or was the photographer putting quotation marks around the action?

To the right, is a photograph of Brad Pitt, also in color and lying on a bed, although, unlike his next-door-neighbors, there isn’t even the pretence that he is engaged in anything; he stares, off-camera, into space. We see enough of the surroundings to surmise that this is a hotel room, but there is nothing in the setting to provide a reason for the subject being there, except that he is posing for a picture. The nearby portrait of Julian Schnabel, on a wall at ninety degrees to the Hollywood stars, makes an interesting comparison.  The painter is also lounging, wearing stripes, but the paint-flecked pajamas and the upholstered studio couch, along with the look to the camera, result in an image as choc-full of suggestion, something one would see in a Renaissance painting with a blasé title like “sloth” or “indolence.” Could it be that the portraits on the Brad Pitt wall were assembled for ironic effect? In the context of the exhibition does the portrait of Brad Pitt become a study in vacancy?

The proximity of a photograph entitled, Traces of the massacre of Tutsi school children on a bathroom wall, Shangi Mission Rwanda supports the idea that the nearby photographs were hung together as a comment on our obsession with celebrity at the expense of all the serious things going on in the world. Unfortunately, the visual syntax in this photograph is garbled: the viewer identifies the marks on a yellow surface as dried blood on a wall, but the marks look like footprints. As the wall is, more or less, a flat plane, I experienced a momentary confusion. It wasn’t disorientation exactly, as I was sure that I was looking at a depiction of a wall rather than the floor, but this spatial ambiguity played into an inability to draw the correct inferences from what was in front of me. A small black and white picture taken in Sarajevo makes a similar statement far more effectively, and I was surprised that this hadn’t been enlarged. In it, a child’s bicycle lies childless on the ground. A smear of blood makes a huge dark arc on the asphalt behind it. Here the composition quickly leads us to the revelation.

Further on, I decided that the humor in an image of Leonardo DiCaprio with a swan’s neck draped around his own was unintentional. It made me think that Annie Leibovitz might be better equipped for irony if she had more of a sense of humor. Imagery this pretentious is ripe for satire. An image of Robert Wilson, glowing ball in hand, is not funny as the DiCaprio portrait but the imagery is as ponderous. A straining for seriousness and drama afflicts a lot of so-called, high-concept photographs these days. A portrait of Donald Trump and the pregnant, gold bikini clad Melania Trump standing on the steps of a private plane leaves no doubt that it is intended to be ironic, but there’s no insight here; the image just looks terribly overwrought and clichéd.

The recent portraits of political figures are not very penetrating either, although in comparison to the earlier pictures of the generals, the group picture of President Bush’s cabinet, in which Colin Powell makes a second appearance, does at least suggest something going on beneath the surface. Powell looks at the viewer skeptically; Cheney wears that grin of his, suggesting hidden rows of sharp little teeth. Rumsfeld winces, suggesting that someone nearby – perhaps the President, jacket open, chest slightly puffed out has just broken wind. Or perhaps he is about to say something. This is the only action in the frame and the only thing that might explain why the exposure was made at this instant rather than at any other time once the bigwigs had been assembled in front of the camera. From the President, my eyes were drawn to the figure of Michael Moore in a neighboring black and white picture. The setting seems cramped and I found myself imagining a subterranean chamber beneath the Whitehouse. Michael Moore, a contemporary Guy Fawkes, crouches slightly, hands in pockets, looking combative. Politics aside, I’d much rather be on Moore’s team with the girls and the sleek video cameras.

The most successful picture on the political wall is (geographically) to the left of the Bush cabinet. The former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, stands in front of a piece of background paper and a subordinate, apparently unaware that he is in the picture, stands in an identical pose, as if this is how everyone in the Justice Department is expected to present himself to the world: upright and uptight, hands slung in front of genitals defensively - although this may have been a precaution just in case the photographer had the presence of mind to deliver a swift kick to the Scales of Justice.

Despite the size of the show, I wish that more of the recent magazine work had been included. Apart from a small room containing pictures of Richard Avedon and his camera, the final room is devoted to mural sized landscapes. Unlike all of the other photographs in the show, the print quality of the murals is poor and, with the exception of two enormous images of an un-discernable Venice in fog, the photographs are of generic, totally clichéd subjects. One image of trees, in particular, wouldn’t have looked out of place in the lobby of a Nineteen-Seventies high-rise apartment building. All of the photographs had the second-generation look of badly reproduced photographs. There wasn’t even any consistency in subject or execution among the relatively small number of pictures on display. One photograph, I could tell from the proportion of the frame, originated from a medium format camera, another, I could see from the size of the grain, was a thirty-five millimeter frame blown-up bigger than God ever intended a snapshot to be enlarged.

Neither were all of the recent portraits, which preceded the landscape room, representative of Annie Leibovitz’s best recent work. This was easy to corroborate. I had only to walk back into the exhibition a short distance to take a look inside the glass containing a miniature, year-by-year retrospective of small prints. In one of the more recent portraits that did make it into the show, Scarlett Johansson is portrayed wearing a curious, sequined top that grips her body like a claw, completely negating her breasts and diminishing her extraordinarily fecund physical presence, which always seems to characterize her on-screen appearances. The peach silk panties and the roundness of her knees go some way towards restoring this, but for a photographer generally so astute in selecting the ingredients in her pictures the costume is a poor choice.

The use of costume in the portrait of Jack and Meg White is, on the other hand, excellent. Casting the White Stripes as a knife-throwing act is also inspired. The silk chemise sported by Jack White compliments his dark, saturnine looks, and the wind blowing his hair across his face mitigates the implicit staginess in an elaborately set-up picture. He turns away from the target with a convincing disregard for the fate of his partner at the center of the target, who exudes an exuberant and sexy cheerfulness that perfectly compliments her particular brand of good looks.

The neighboring photograph of Nicole Kidman from 2003 has been singled out in some reviews as an ironic comment on celebrity. It’s also the photograph in the exhibition in which the subject looks least like they ordinarily do in pictures – which is to say, from our point of view, least like ‘her self’. This is largely because the subject is looking out of the frame, rather than at the viewer, with the result that her face is shown in profile and is hence much less identifiable. Her hair disguises her further. Rather than worn long and around her face, it is cropped and swept back, the color of a bleached looking, movie star, blonde, suggesting that the photograph is making a universal point about celebrity rather than Nicole Kidman, the film actor, in particular. What you can be sure of is that the black curtain hanging at the side of the proscenium has been twisted to mimic the swirl of the white dress around Nicole Kidman’s knees. It seems Leibovitz is suggesting that however splendid and prolonged our time in the light, blackness waits in the wings. 

There is something disconcertingly un-photographic looking about the Kidman photograph, although Annie Leibovitz’s photographs are often so perfect I wouldn’t put it past her to have found a way to make spotlights produce such crisp beams. In addition, she backlights the figure without sacrificing detail in the auditorium behind. In my experience, lights pointing directly at the camera create flare, scattering light across the film that would create a halo of light around the figure. This photograph looks like a digital composite made from a number of exposures, or else a digital manipulation of a single frame, extracting detail in the background and straightening up the two beams of light so that they have the same kind of iconic clarity as an illustration. The important point is not that manipulating a photograph digitally is somehow cheating. It is that when a photograph begins to resemble an illustration too closely, it loses the credibility commanded by a photograph as a statement of fact--it’s analogous to what would happen if the viewer were to discover that the subject was a Nicole Kidman look-a-like rather than the real thing.

This leads me to what must be the most frequently asked question about a celebrity photographer’s assigned work: How interesting would it be if the subject was a complete unknown? It’s a tricky question.  In my opinion, it is likely that as her subjects become the stars of yesteryear, they will retain a patina of fame - as has always happened to the subjects enshrined in Vanity Fair portraits from a bye-gone era. But this is a secondary point. As famous people are - and some might say celebrity itself is - her subject, it seems unfair to ask that her subject be set aside so as to judge the work. Fame, it seems to me, is as legitimate a subject for photography as anything else, and I don’t see why the assigned photographs in the show should be disqualified as works of art just because, as far as the public is concerned, there is a built in reason to take an interest in them.

It is also naïve to think that a studio portrait is intrinsically any better or worse than a documentary photograph, but it’s as foolish to suggest that all photographs are the same just because they are made by the same person - which Leibovitz claims at the beginning of the show. A documentary photographer needs to find ways to evoke empathy in the viewer and this is a process that is foreign to Annie Leibovitz; you can’t simply command empathy by depicting a loved-one in extremis.

This studio portrait of Susan Sontag is far more interesting than the sequence of personal pictures Leibovitz captured of her partner in the hospital. It is a celebrity picture, Sontag being a celebrity of sorts, and like the assigned work it depends not so much on knowing anything about her, but on having seen other pictures of her before. The cut of her short gray hair enhances the masculinity of her face and it’s hard to tell if you are looking at a man or a woman. Not knowing who the subject was at first, it was this ambiguity that got my attention, but once I did recognize the face, I found myself thinking about the transformative effects of illness – an empathetic response that the documentary pictures failed to bring about.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is one of the strongest photographs in the show, although bearing in mind the photographer’s estimation of her studio work, it is clear that she would prefer posterity to judge her assigned work on portraits that are shot in a setting rather than in a neutral environment.

Even within this sub category of work the intention varies. It ranges from a portrait which seems to say no more than, "this is the Bush administration," through to allegorical pictures, such as the portrait of Chris Rock cast as a carnival figure in whiteface. What unifies the work is that it is highly produced and has a luxurious, technical perfection, although the aforementioned tendency to look glib is mitigated in recent years as the photographs have become darker--literally and metaphorically.

But in spite of the shift towards portraits in settings, which is in step with an industry-wide trend away from studio portraiture, Annie Leibovitz’s work can be still be placed firmly within a Vanity Fair tradition stretching all the way back to the American photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer. Her photographs are never overtly critical of the subject or in any way disparaging. If a star is cast in an outré role, as in the Chris Rock portrait, it is with his full consent, and even when the image is intended to be ironic this is so muted that it doesn’t interfere with the implicit promotional function of the photograph. In the end, the scope of the assigned work in this exhibition is not limited because it is celebrity portraiture, but any claim to it being art with a capital A is circumscribed by the tacit arrangement in which a star attracts readers to the pages of a magazine in exchange for the kind of publicity you couldn’t buy.