By HILARIE M. SHEETS
On a recent morning at her
photography studio in Chelsea, Annie Leibovitz was affectionately discussing
with her longtime friend Gloria Steinem a photo shoot they did together.
“I think it’s important for
a young student or writer to see you at work,” Ms. Leibovitz had told her.
In the finished portrait,
now tacked to the wall, Ms. Steinem, the 82-year-old political activist and
women’s advocate, is captured lost in thought — or concern — at her computer,
surrounded by books and paper, and bathed in the glow of her desk lamp. “It is,
of course, the place that means the most to me,” Ms. Steinem said, “because
it’s where I write — and where I’m unable to write.”
Continue reading the main
story
The intimate picture of Ms.
Steinem was the first of dozens of new images of female leaders — in politics,
sports, business and culture — that Ms. Leibovitz, 67, began taking last year
to update her 1999 project “Women,” a book collaboration with her partner of 15
years, Susan Sontag, who died in 2004. “It really resonated,” Ms. Leibovitz
said, but “the project was never done.”
Seventeen years down the
line, with “Women: New Portraits,” she is adding to history, with a new mentor,
Ms. Steinem; a new generation of viewers to reach; and a new format beyond the
printed page. Since January, Ms. Leibovitz has been on a 10-city international
tour, appearing not in museums or shopping malls but in historically rich
“pop-up” sites where the audience is invited to join her in “talking circles,” led
by Ms. Steinem. They have focused on issues that range from sexual violence
against women in Mexico City to women’s experiences in the technology world in
San Francisco.
“Talking in groups like
that, it brings me to tears that we can do this sort of work within the show,”
said Ms. Leibovitz, who added that the new work is more “democratic” — more
personal, more satisfying, more concerned with what someone does (like Andréa
Medina Rosas, a human rights lawyer working with women on the United
States-Mexico border) rather than how they look.
“And being there with
Gloria and talking in groups like that,” she said. “God, is it possible it
could be like this? I like this life.”
Plausibly the leading
celebrity photographer in the world, Ms. Leibovitz has been shooting women as
personalities for 45 years, in the glossy pages of “Rolling Stone,” “Vanity
Fair” and “Vogue,” earning what was once reported to be $5 million annually,
and up to $250,000 for advertising clients.
With her strong,
opinionated voice, she has done much to define the canon of contemporary
portraiture, producing indelible and provocative images that included a nude
John Lennon huddled against his clothed wife, Yoko Ono; the partly clad Disney
star Miley Cyrus at 15; the very pregnant and very nude Demi Moore; and Ms. Ono
after her husband’s death — her “tears” courtesy of a Vaseline camera trick
(though Ms. Ono told others that Ms. Leibovitz never explained why she was
being daubed with Vaseline).
“We were looking hard in
1999 for women C.E.O.s and women who ran companies — we shot Carly Fiorina,”
Ms. Leibovitz said, comparing the two projects. “Now, it seems that there
really are many more women in high positions. It seemed like issues were more
in the forefront.”
There is nary a nude among
the rows of portraits pinned to the studio wall behind her, sponsored by a
carte blanche commission, valued in the millions of dollars, from UBS, the
financial services company — though one could hardly imagine asking the singer
Adele at her piano, the television producer Shonda Rhimes on set, the Pakistani
activist Malala Yousafzai in a classroom, the primatologist Jane Goodall, or
the senator Elizabeth Warren to disrobe. Caitlyn Jenner is the most scantily
clad of the group.
Gloria Steinem, left, and
Annie Leibovitz in the photographer’s studio. Credit Philip Montgomery for The
New York Times
Revisiting the 1999
project, she said: “I wanted to see Gloria Steinem older. I wanted Misty
Copeland, the first black prima ballerina of a company that’s been in existence
for 75 years.” And no one knew Lena Dunham. Ms. Leibovitz is working hard to
get a few minutes alone with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who doesn’t
like to be photographed, before the show’s opening on Oct. 14 in Frankfurt.
“You can’t look at all
those images without seeing the true human diversity of women, not
characterized by whatever feminine idea or roles of who we’re supposed to be,”
said Ms. Steinem, who helped compile the list.
The age-old format of sharing
stories in the circle is “activism 101,” she added. A circle of chairs is
placed in the center of each installation, flanked by the new portraits on a
long bulletin board; two large monitors project a slide-show of Ms. Leibovitz’s
earlier pictures. The tour began in London last January at the Wapping
Hydraulic Power Station, and freshly shot portraits have been added in each
city.
“When you’re a
photographer, you work in a vacuum,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “You take a picture,
it gets published. You don’t really hear from people. This kind of thing, where
you get to see people looking, it makes me want to do more of it and be more
engaged like that.”
On Nov. 18, the exhibition
will open in New York in the gymnasium of the old Bayview Correctional
Facility, a former women’s prison on West 20th Street and 11th Avenue that
closed after damage from Hurricane Sandy. After the exhibition finishes there
on Dec. 11, Deborah Berke Partners and the NoVo Foundation will begin
transforming the Art Deco structure into the Women’s Building, a future hub for
women’s groups and services. When it opens in 2020, its forlorn cells will be
gone and its terra-cotta facade and colorful wall mosaics restored.
Ms. Steinem said she has
been “tap-dancing hard” to help get the plans for the women’s center through bureaucratic
approvals and steered Ms. Leibovitz to the space. They have invited formerly
incarcerated women from Bayview to be docents and will lead a discussion on
women’s rights and female incarceration in a public gathering on Nov. 16.
The initial idea for a book
of photographs about women was Ms. Sontag’s, whom Ms. Leibovitz met in 1989
while taking her photograph. She described prepping for her first dinner date
with the formidable writer by reading two of Ms. Sontag’s books and The New
York Times front to back. “I wanted to take note cards with me,” she laughed,
adding that Ms. Sontag was “so charming and so nice.”
Their relationship began
during the throes of Ms. Leibovitz’s work at Vanity Fair, for which she
famously shot Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk. (A prolific
researcher, Ms. Leibovitz was referencing one of the comedian’s stage personas
— that of a black girl who uses bleach to scrub her skin in an attempt to look
white.)
Ms. Sontag encouraged her
to tackle a complicated and personal series. “I knew that if I was going to be
involved with Susan Sontag, I was going to have to be better — be a better
photographer, be a better person,” Ms. Leibovitz said. She used as her template
the photographer August Sander’s concept of documenting “all walks of life” and
went out to find schoolteachers, astronauts, Supreme Court justices, farmers,
socialites, prostitutes, the first lady, coal miners, athletes.
The biggest difference
she’s found between 1999 and today is the self-confidence she sees in the women
she’s photographing.
Eva Respini, the chief
curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, who hasn’t worked
directly with Ms. Leibovitz, finds the project striking for the “implicit
collaboration” between the photographer and the sitters. “Because of Annie’s
own power, she’s able to get her subjects to reveal something of themselves,
subjects that I would imagine are usually pretty guarded,” she said.
“Oftentimes, when you have a male photographer and a female sitter, there is a
kind of imbalance of power to start with. What I see in these photos is a
leveling of the playing field.”
The New York exhibition
will introduce Ms. Leibovitz’s new portrait of Serena and Venus Williams, shot
in September after Serena’s unexpected defeat in the semifinals of the United
States Open and the loss of her No. 1 ranking. In the portrait, the sisters are
locked in an embrace, with the older, taller Venus like a protective wrapper
around a more vulnerable-looking Serena.
“It was a tough shoot,” Ms.
Leibovitz said. “It’s a real thing how they take care of each other and hold
each other up.” After Venus lost to Serena in last year’s United States Open,
Ms. Leibovitz was inspired by a full-page picture in The Times of the sisters
hugging that she ripped it from the paper and stuck on her refrigerator for her
three adolescent daughters — Sarah, born in 2001, and the twins Susan and
Samuelle, in 2005. “I said, ‘They are sisters.’” She worked for a year to
schedule the last shoot.
Ms. Leibovitz in 1999,
preparing for her exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. Credit Khue
Bui/Associated Press
“A sitting is very
psychological,” said Ms. Leibovitz, who spent a day in Virginia with the
photographer Sally Mann, by the river where Ms. Mann had photographed her own
children. “Because she’s a photographer, she knows what you want, or wish you
could have, and there was a kind of resistance initially to giving that. Then,
partway through, there was a moment — you could almost see it happen. She gave
me those pictures.”
Yet Ms. Leibovitz was
clearly uncomfortable with the reversal of roles when a photographer arrived at
her Chelsea studio to shoot her and Ms. Steinem. Ms. Leibovitz interrogated the
man on how he positioned them, the angle he was shooting from, and his choice
of lighting, at one point leaping up to inspect how it looked on the screen at
the rear of his camera. “I can’t help myself, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such a
control freak.” (She later invited him back for another photo session.)
Ms. Leibovitz has kept a
tight rein artistically but not always business-wise. She faced well-publicized
financial problems in 2009 after taking ill-advised loans of millions of
dollars and using her homes and rights to her photographs as collateral. She
has spoken of the many stresses she faced, from existing mortgages on her homes
to federal and state tax liens, to lawsuits, to expenses associated with the
deaths of Ms. Sontag and her own parents, and the birth of three children.
“I kept waiting for a
knight in armor to come save the day, but the only answer to it was just for me
to work hard,” Ms. Leibovitz said recently. She refinanced the loans in 2010
and said she repaid the outstanding balances by 2011. (In 2014, she sold her
West Village townhouse complex for $28.5 million and “downsized” to an $11
million apartment on the Upper West Side.)
“It’s always a kind of
tortuous thing between art and commerce — how we make a living,” she said. She
calls assignment work for magazines “a great highway,” even if the pictures
that get published aren’t always her favorites.
“Alexandra Fuller, Wyoming,
2016” Credit Annie Leibovitz
Her association with UBS
began in 2014, when she was hired to shoot an advertising campaign. When UBS
asked if there was something she was interested in doing for herself, she
proposed the series of new women portraits. “It harkens back to being
commissioned in the Renaissance,” she said.
The bank agreed to her fee
but would not discuss details.
According to Johan Jervoe,
the chief marketing officer at UBS, it has made the exhibitions free for the
public and sponsored educational programs and workshops for art students with
Ms. Leibovitz at each space. UBS gets a set of prints at the end to add to its
corporate collection of 35,000 artworks and the association of Ms. Leibovitz’s
high-profile tour to burnish its brand.
“This is a dream assignment
for me,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “Not enough people talk about how great it is to
get older and some of the cool stuff you get to do.”
That can mean jumping into
the pool, as she did recently to photograph the Olympic swimming champion Katie
Ledecky underwater, pushing off from the side as though in a trance. Ms.
Leibovitz is confident she will be photographing Hillary Clinton in the White
House. “This is her time,” she said.
When will she consider the
project complete? “Susan herself said this was always a work in progress,” Ms.
Leibovitz said. “Women are a work in progress. To my dying day, I’ll be doing
these photographs.”
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario