Photographer Annie Leibovitz exposes nuances of family, love, celebrity in SF retrospective

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."

That maligned shot of Jack Nicholson is in "A Photographer's Life," and such criticism draws a spirited response from Matthew Yokobosky, chief exhibition designer with the Brooklyn Museum, who worked closely with Leibovitz to create the show.

Leibovitz does show us the unexpected, Yokobosky says.

"There's a beautiful shot of Demi Moore when she's pregnant, with Bruce Willis' arms wrapped around her," he said. "It is intimate in a way that you don't normally see in photographs of them." Yokobosky also points to a section of the exhibit that highlights Leibovitz's raw and gritty photojournalism during the 1993 siege of Sarajevo. One of the most powerful of these shots focuses on a toppled bicycle lying next to a smear of blood on a city street.

But even the glossiest celebrity photos are part of an artistic tradition, Yokobosky argues. "Annie can get the best people, the best stylists, the best lighting to make these incredible high-end photographs," he said. "If you go back in history, you'll also see that same extreme artifice in 19th century oil painting."

Yet "A Photographer's Life" is clearly aiming for something more personal and less artificial, especially in its unblinking focus on the deaths of Susan Sontag and Samuel Leibovitz, the photographer's father.

In a 2006 TV interview about her book with Charlie Rose, Leibovitz made that intent explicit. After complaining about the modern obsession with celebrity, she told Rose: "We want to see things that feel more real, that are more real. I mean, we're tired of making things up all the time."

Sontag was first treated for cancer in 1998 and then became sick again in 2004. In both cases, she encouraged Leibovitz to document her illness, as the photographer explains in an introduction to "A Photographer's Life":

"I forced myself to take pictures of Susan's last days," Leibovitz wrote. "Perhaps the pictures completed the work she and I had begun together when she was sick in 1998. I didn't analyze it then. I just knew I had to do it."

The resulting photos of Sontag snared in a web of tubes and medical equipment are likely to provoke both fascination and pain. And for Sappington, these shots are one of the most important accomplishments of this photo collection.

"This work is so intimate, so completely opposite from what she was photographing before," Sappington said. "It's like a different person at work."

Leibovitz herself might agree with that assessment, judging from the conclusion to her introductory essay in the book.

"I didn't realize until later how far the work on the book had taken me through the grieving process," she wrote. "It's the closest thing to who I am that I've ever done."

Patrick Sullivan is a Bay Area freelancer who writes occasional entertainment stories for The Press Democrat.