I went to the Brooklyn Museum with my parents on the last day of Annie Leibovitz’s show. It was packed when we got there, but was even more packed as we were leaving. After hearing Liz rave about it, I wanted to check it out for myself. On the whole, I have to say I was a little disappointed with her work, but I really liked Ron Mueck’s sculptures in the next room.
The sculptures were of the hyper-realistic variety, either very small or very large people accurately captured down to the wrinkles on their elbows and the five o’clock shadow on their chins. I’m not talking about a gray-smudged jowl, I’m talking about thousands of hairs meticulously inserted into fiberglass or silicone skin. There were veins, there were eyelashes, there were sagging midsections. You almost expected them to move or blink or at least tell the enormous crowds to mind their own business. Looking at them felt like looking at three dimensional photographs, capturing a moment in time. Not only were they physically realistic, but the moments that they captured seemed very emotionally real as well, all of the people seemed to be feeling strong emotions at the moment they were frozen. This mask looks like it might wake up at any time even though it’s four feet long.
Leibovitz’s stuff I was less keen on. She did photograph a lot of celebrities, but it seemed like it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time. Since she was photographing for the cover of Rolling Stone, she does a good job of capturing the personae that celebrities want to project. She does not capture the true person behind the mask. There was a picture of GW Bush and cabinet that was well executed, but in no way revealed any character or personality of the subjects. It was cleverly juxtaposed with a picture of Michael Moore and crew, which was entertaining, but I didn’t even feel that I could see into the liberals any better. There were lots of family photos, which could have been showing anyone’s family and were generally unremarkable. The stories behind them were interesting and moving, but the photographs themselves were not so much.
One picture that I did find quite moving was of a fallen bicycle on a blood stained road. It was taken on a trip to Sarajevo during the war. The rider had been hit by a mortar and died on the way to the hospital in Leibovitz’s car. Another that I quite like is the photograph of Nicole Kidman that the museum used to advertise the show. Quite dramatic and rich. The most interesting aspect of the show was that Leibovitz managed to photograph so many celebrities, not anything that was captured in the photos themselves.
