Leibovitz at the Brooklyn Museum

by Andrew Bast

For decades Annie Leibovitz has worked as a photographer for the nation's classiest glossies. Rolling stone covers? That's old hat to the 57-year-old photojournalist. Her portraits of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore, or of George W. Bush, his Presidential belt buckle blazing, likely flashed before your eyes in recent years, if the copies of Vanity Fair didn't spend a month on your coffee table.

But it's with an ever-more emotional eye that you'll have to see these gelatin prints now hanging at the Brooklyn Museum. Yes, Bush and Moore, big and in color, are on display, but more importantly, so is Leibovitz's far more arresting war work form Sarajevo and Africa. And then there's the tear-jerker portrait of her mother. 

And portraits are where Leibovitz unflinchingly grinds you through the sentimental wringer. The eyes, oh the eyes she captures! Her mother, without a doubt, but also a gorgeous Leonardo DiCaprio (with a goose wrapped around his neck), a gripping Colin Powell (dressed in full uniform), and Cindy Crawford (naked, a boa constrictor draped across her shoulders). All those eyes are more than enough for an afternoon.

Yet two searingly morbid prints may make the trip to the Eastern Parkway stop on the 2/3 train worth it all by themselves: first, a fallen bicycle in Sarajevo. Apparently its rider, a young child, had just been struck by a mortar and then died soon thereafter on the way to the hospital. And second, undoubtedly the most horrifying image of the exhibit is a yellow-colored concrete stall covered in the bloody footprints of a Tutsi massacre, the blood-red toe outlines vile enough to turn your gut.

The downside to the show is the lack of information provided with the photographs; portraits list subjects but leave the viewer clueless as to whom they are or why they may have been shot. Also, it's vital to know why each of the photographs was comissioned. The portrait of Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, was that for Vanity Fair? Rolling Stone? Was Leibovitz that connected, personally?

The large-scale landcapes, to which the curator dedicated an entire room, are forgettable, and reading the notes on the wall you have to wonder why they were included at all (Leibovitz herself describes the shoot in the American West as, "miserable").

Much of the exhibition also centers on Leibovitz's personal life, much of which focuses on the American intellectual Susan Sontag and her death. The images are confounding, yet, in Leibovitz's trademark style, entrancing.

Highly recommended.

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 on view at the Brooklyn Museum through January 21, 2007. 2/3 train to Eastern Parkway. Suggested admission: $8, $4 seniors and students.

("Susan at Home" courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.)