Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz likes to spend time in the woods around her home in upstate New York. “They never fail to evoke an emotional response in me,” she’s said; “the lines of the horizon, the gentle curve of the trees.” That’s the kind of talk that characterizes the panoramic approach Leibovitz is known for in her art. She never did care for facial close-ups, for example “” “not enough information.”
So if you go to “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005,” which runs Feb. 10 through April 22 at the San Diego Museum of Art, be prepared to see more than 200 photographs of background-intensive fare, culled from Leibovitz’s wide-angle, concept-driven collections on the birth of her three daughters (one of whom she gave birth to five years ago, at age 52), events involving her large family and her assignment work, including images from the siege of Sarajevo and landscapes of the American West and the Jordanian desert.
Public figures in the collection feature a pregnant Demi Moore from the acclaimed Vanity Fair magazine cover; John Lennon only hours before his death; former South African President Nelson Mandela in Soweto, President Bush and his Cabinet and underground author William S. Burroughs.
Leibovitz’s work has been the subject of a similar retrospective “” that collection involved her work from 1970 to 1990 and was exhibited in Washington, D.C. and New York, and it included her photos from Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. But that was then, and this is now, when museum patrons seem to clamor for more and greater spectacle in their fare. In Leibowitz’s early days, visual pop culture was shedding some of its aging technologies and embracing the David Bowie-driven glam-punk scene as captured by the likes of photo icon Mick Rock. Some circles, then, might construe the museum’s exhibit a nod to Leibovitz’s tenure and the nostalgia that today’s large-scale multimedia installments evoke.
“It is not the museum’s intention,” museum executive director Derrick Cartwright answered, “to sanction any newly manifested public hungers through its presentation of [the exhibit]. Rather, we are displaying both the familiar and unfamiliar sides of a leading photographer’s practice.
Leibovitz possesses some legitimate and broad household recognition for the photography she has published in Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and other mass-market periodicals, but this exhibition simultaneously recasts that work in light of a more complex and nuanced practice and presents a completely new side of her art to museumgoers.
“Defining the exhibition as spectacle risks missing the solemn, elegiac and lastingly poetic moments that Leibovitz has captured and that I hope many visitors will appreciate.”
Writer Susan Sontag, with whom Leibovitz had a decade-plus relationship until Sontag’s death in 2004, is an occasional subject. She’s also featured in the Random House book that bears the same name as the exhibit, a book Leibovitz originally thought might contain only personal retrospectives.
“Then,” as she writes in the book, “when I realized that I had so much more personal material than I had imagined, and that the period this book covers is almost exactly the years I was with Susan, I considered doing a book made up completely of personal work. I thought about that for a while and concluded that the personal work on its own wasn’t a true view of the last 15 years. I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.
“It’s the best book I have ever done,” she told London’s The Independent on Tuesday, Jan. 30, “and it was a way of trying to be understood in some way. You publish it because at some level everyone wants to be understood, it’s totally your soul and your inside. But listen, I am a working photographer, so don’t put me on any pedestals or pigeonhole me. I am a working photographer; that’s all."
The San Diego Museum of Art is located at 1450 El Prado in Balboa Park. Hours are Tuesdays through Sundays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., except Thursdays, when the museum is open until 9 p.m. Admission is free for members and children 5 and under, $10 for adults and $4 for children aged 6 to 17. The phone number is (619) 232-7931. More information is available at www.sdmart.org.