Annie Leibovitz: A pilgrim's progress
-
Georgia O'Keeffe's door. (From Annie Leibovitz's "Pilgrimage," Random House, 2011.) -
Photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Share with others:
Beginning a book of photography with images made from a point and shoot camera is something one would expect of a tourist, not an acclaimed photographer, and especially not from Annie Leibovitz. But the renowned portrait photographer, 2009 recipient of the International Center of Photography's Lifetime Achievement Award, tries something different in "Pilgrimage," her first photographic book without a single human portrait.
When a master artist deviates from the style of their fame, it's often of nagging desperation or exhaustion of a genre--a pining, perhaps, to re-establish the sacred connection their work made with the world the first time around. But for Ms. Leibovitz, a woman haunted with the spectre of a very public bankruptcy and a sprawling legacy that carried her name out of the art world and into the vernacular of the casual viewer, it's genius.
Random House ($50).
Her journey began in Amherst, Mass. In town for her cousin's son's bar mitzvah, Ms. Leibovitz stopped at the country home where Emily Dickinson and her sister lived alone during their waning years. The house, now a museum but previously a private residence, begged to be examined in closer detail, but Ms. Leibovitz passed.
"For someone who spent most of her time quietly by herself, the details would have been wonderful to contemplate. And to feel. They weren't meant for anyone else," Ms. Leibovitz acknowledges.
Three hundred feet from the sisters' house, the residence of Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother, stood quietly. Night was falling, and after a short walk along a path connecting the houses, Ms. Leibovitz stopped dead in her tracks.
"There were heavy curtains. Every bit of wall space had some kind of picture on it, oddly placed. The house had been left the way it was when Emily and Austin were alive. You could feel the people who had lived there," she writes.
Exploring the house, Ms. Leibovitz found herself unable to enter the small bedroom where Austin's son had died.
"Pilgrimage" begins and ends with lists . One could see the table of contents as the work of an absent-minded student of American History.
Charles Darwin. Abraham Lincoln. Martha Graham. Annie Oakley. Pete Seeger. Old Faithful.
Each represents something to the world, and more importantly, something to Ms. Leibovitz. The book's chronology records the comings and goings of these subjects in a concluding timeline. And revealed in the middle are the pieces of life that have made these people worthy of inclusion in such a list, and thus, our attention.
Part historical record and part interpretive work of inference-based documentary, what may be considered legend by some is given a multi-dimensionality by Ms. Leibovitz. Her still-lifes beg us to consider their "thingness" by suspending their historical context and cultural significance in favor of their being. We see what they've become through years of life -- rips in tattered clothing, small rub marks from years of storage, dust.
An image of Lincoln's hat is plain. Yet after examination, one begins to wonder if this overbearing plainness is intentional--perhaps an interpretation by Ms. Leibovitz reinforced by the forced tonality of her image.
Or, a foldout of the meshing of a bed in Thoreau's lakeside cabin. The muted colors and ripped meshing ask our conscious to ascribe higher meaning -- narrowing in on ripped meshing that may just echo some of Thoreau's greatest passages.
The bits and pieces of life Annie Leibovitz photographs recall why each person matters -- not just as noteworthy members of society, but as individual members of families, as lovers, as humans.
The path at Sandlot where Darwin walked every day. The gloves in Lincoln's back pocket on the night he was shot. The unheated sleeping porch at the Val-Kil cottage where Eleanor Roosevelt often slept in the winter. We learn of the humanity of these subjects and draw close to it, ignoring pedigree in the face of human understanding.
And for locations of significance, Ms. Leibovitz recalls their enduring sense of place. A remote, barren hillside where Georgia O'Keeffe produced some of her greatest works. Dresses hanging in the closet of Gladys Presley. Each locale makes us believe just how much location shapes character.
A pilgrimage is understood to be sacred for a reason. Annie Leibovitz, with all the legacy and eminence of her portraiture work and public life, has discovered why.
First Published December 11, 2011 12:00 am
