IF YOU GO
What: "Annie Leibovitz:
A Photographer's Life"
Where: Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, San Francisco
When: Saturday through May 25. 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday. Closed Monday.
Admission: $15, with discounts for seniors and students. Free 12 and younger.
Information:
(415) 750-3600, www.legionofhonor.org
The death of her father, her lover's grim battle with cancer, the blood-stained surgical instruments from her own Caesarean section. Blood, sweat and tears course through the 15 years of photographs that make up "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005," opening Saturday at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
Cynical souls might imagine that an art museum offers an Annie Leibovitz exhibit for the same reason that a zoo shows off a new baby panda: Both are sure-fire crowd pleasers that keep the turnstiles humming.
After all, during two decades of work for Vanity Fair and Vogue, Leibovitz has sold millions of magazines by producing a cascade of incredibly gorgeous photos of incredibly gorgeous celebrities.
Anyone hungry for eye candy will find some satisfaction in this exhibit, which includes photos of a topless Kate Moss cuddling with Johnny Depp on a hotel bed, a topless Cindy Crawford cuddling with a boa constrictor, and Scarlett Johansson sprawled alluringly across a couch.
But such images are not at the heart of this collection, which first came together in a book of the same title published in 2006 and then as an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.
Movie stars accustomed to dominating magazine covers are placed in context here -- and perhaps even shoved to the periphery -- by Leibovitz's intense photographic scrutiny of her relationship with her parents, her siblings, and her lover, author Susan Sontag.
"A Photographer's Life" was born in the wake of a six-week period in which both Sontag and Leibovitz's father died. The exhibit contains powerful, even shocking images of the sickness and death. Yet the photos also celebrate the birth of Leibovitz's three daughters and her mother's exuberant personality.
"It is really a major retrospective for an artist who is best known to the world for her celebrity and commercial work," said Legion of Honor director John Buchanan. "This exhibit contains deeply private work of her family and her friends, so it gives us a chance to get below the surface of the work of an artist we thought we knew."
The Leibovitz most people think they know launched her career in 1970 by walking into the offices of Rolling Stone. The 20-year-old art student -- then studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute -- soon became the magazine's second staff photographer, using a 35-millimeter camera and natural lighting to capture iconic images of the likes of John Lennon and Mick Jagger.
Leibovitz was an extraordinarily talented photojournalist, according to Baron Wolman, Rolling Stone's first staff photographer, a former Sonoma County resident who now lives in New Mexico.
"But there has been a major sea change in her work since then," said Wolman, speaking by phone from Santa Fe. "She began trying to organize the photos rather than just documenting what was there. That's not a criticism -- it's just a shift in perspective."
That shift became a trademark. Today, Leibovitz is best known for big-budget photo shoots requiring armies of hair stylists, makeup artists and technicians to operate wind machines and other special-effects devices.
"Her work is really now almost more painting than it is photography," said George Rose, a Healdsburg photographer known for a grittier approach to shooting celebrities for the Los Angeles Times in the 1970s and '80s. "She employs all the latest digital techniques, and her productions sometimes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."
John Sappington, a Sebastopol photographer and Santa Rosa Junior College art instructor, says Leibovitz is perhaps the most significant portrait photographer of the baby boom generation. He describes her Vogue-style work as a theater of hyper-reality.
"All the colors are oversaturated, all the characteristics of her subjects are exaggerated," Sappington said. "It's a cartoon reality where everybody looks like high-end food."
Leibovitz's celebrity shoots have produced some well-known photos, including the infamous Vanity Fair cover featuring a very pregnant -- and very naked -- Demi Moore. But they have also drawn withering criticism.
"What distinguishes her pictures from those of other major portrait photographers is a refusal in some part to seek out and divulge anything about a particular subject that you might not already surmise or know," New York Times critic Ginia Bellafante wrote in a 2003 review of Leibovitz's work. "Aware that the world thinks of Jack Nicholson as an endearingly self-satisfied guy, Ms. Leibovitz will take a picture of him looking endearingly self-satisfied."
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