Let Us Now Praise Famous Women
Women , a collection of photographs by celebrity photographer Annie
Leibovitz with an introductory essay by Susan Sontag, has already been soundly spanked by the
critics. So why talk about it now? Because while its detractors have rightly
noted that the book's organizing principle--women in all their diversity--is
banal, they have not responded to an implicit and probably unintended message
of the book. As Culturebox sees it, the real topic of Women is
Celebrity--specifically, how the world looks to a celebrity photographer.
Let's start with the
pictures--portraits of women, most of them well-known, a few of them not.
Leibovitz photographed the famous women on assignment for high-end magazines
( Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker ). She probably took the pictures of
the unknown women on her own. (There are no notes to tell us where the
photographs were originally published, so it's hard to say which pictures were
assignments and which ones Leibovitz was simply moved to take.) The famous are
depicted in ways designed to reinforce our warmest feelings about them. Hillary
Clinton looks youthfully studious as she pores over papers on the White House's
sunny balcony. A bold and cheerful Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas,
hefts a rifle on a hunting expedition. Performer Anna Deavere Smith holds up
one hand and testifies, seemingly lost inside one of her many magnificent
evangelical characters. Sigourney Weaver, Nicole Kidman, and Drew Barrymore are
each sexy in their own glamorous ways. The athletes are each tough in their own
heroic ways. As the image of one famous woman follows another, we seem to
understand why they've made such names for themselves: They are so singular, so
attractive, so powerful, the world just had to take notice of them.
It's
harder to describe the nonfamous women, since their portraits lend themselves
less well to personal characterization. Unlike the celebrity portraits, these
were mostly taken without benefit of makeup, props, and lighting design; as a
result, faces tend to disappear into contexts. The miners are grimy. The sewing
machine operator sews. The farmers farm. The teen-ager is ripely innocent. The
victim of domestic abuse looks battered. They are icons, in short, either of
their pioneering professions or else of their stereotypically feminine
situation. The path-breaking professionals tend to stare defiantly into the
camera: Imagine telling Dorothy A. Richman, a rabbinical student wrapped in
phylacteries and holding a Torah, that she can't serve God! The women trapped
in servile roles, on the other hand, withdraw from Leibovitz. Their faces are
blank or frankly hostile. You can't look for long at the picture of Maria
Eugenia Ponce, a waitress at a Los Angeles diner, so raw are the shame and
distrust in her eyes. We still feel a certain warmth toward these
all-but-anonymous women--Leibovitz specializes in warm--but it's a much more
abstract emotion. We feel proud of, or sad for, women in general, not for any
woman in particular.
In short, individuality here becomes a function of fame. The better known
you are, the more appealing a personality Leibovitz will grant you. This is not
to accuse her of lacking sympathy for the nonfamous. But Leibovitz is a
commercial photographer. When she's told to shoot a celebrity, she shows up
with a crew, an expansive amount of time, and the driving idea that this person
is important and must be allowed to get her identity across. Non-celebrities
have less claim on Leibovitz, on her time, money, and curiosity, and therefore
a reduced impact on us--although it must also be said that Leibovitz makes
distinctions between non-celebrities, according an empathy and humanity to
inspiring professionals that she can't seem to extend to the abjectly
downtrodden.
To be fair to Leibovitz, she's working under two other constraints. One is
formal: It's hard to communicate roundness of character in a single photograph,
which is perforce a limited slice of space and time. How much easier it must be
to photograph women whose identities are already publicly disseminated! All you
have to do is gather up the strands of commonly told tales and give them visual
representation--a gesture, the color of the light, a costume, a chance
expression--in order to produce an image that feels both knowing and right. The
second constraint may be the more important one. Leibovitz, after all, works
for editors at glossy magazines who spend their days wrangling celebrities onto
their pages. Celebrities demand flattering representation as the price of their
cooperation, and no one is better at flattering in a sophisticated yet intimate
way than Leibovitz. Should she ever stop making her celebrity subjects look
good, her career would quickly come to an end.
Nonetheless, this troubling collusion of photography and social hierarchy
(for fame is well on its way to replacing class as the determining factor of
status in America) is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect Susan Sontag to
hold forth about with brilliance and insight. And she does, too, just not in
her introduction, a disconnected series of meditations on what a collection of
photographs of women might tell us in this day and age. (Very little, she is
finally forced to admit.) Only in one clause does Sontag hint at the conditions
underlying the book--"today's hugely complex fashion-and-photography system,"
she calls it--but the topic at hand is something else, and she veers away.
Leibovitz, after all, is her very dear friend, and this is a coffee-table book,
not a work of criticism. But consider what a younger, sharper-tongued Sontag
might have written. This is her from On Photography , a collection of
essays published during the 1970s. The subject was August Sander, a 1920s
photographer who also set out to catalogue a large category of people, in his
case Germans, but you could substitute Leibovitz for Sander and come out with
an apt reading:
Sander's social sample is unusually, conscientiously broad. He includes
bureaucrats and peasants, servants and society ladies, factory workers and
industrialists, soldiers and gypsies, actors and clerks. But such variety does
not rule out class condescension. Sander's eclectic style gives him away. Some
photographs are casual, fluent, naturalistic; others are naïve and awkward. ...
Unself-consciously, Sander adjusted his style to the social rank of the person
he was photographing. Professionals and the rich tend to be photographed
indoors, without props. They speak for themselves. Laborers and derelicts are
usually photographed in a setting (often outdoors) which locates them, which
speaks for them--as if they could not be assumed to have the kinds of separate
identities normally achieved in the middle and upper classes. ... Sander's
complicity with everybody also means a distance from everybody. His complicity
with his subjects is not naïve ... but nihilistic.
Indeed.
Photographs are from Women by Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag. Hillary
Rodham Clinton, the White House, Washington, D.C. Shen Chu, Sewing machine
operator, Four Maples Ladies' Blouse Company, Chinatown, New York City.
