The exhibition“Annie Leibovitz Photographs, 1970-1990” begins by describing her first two decades of dedication to photography focused on the world of music. Later, “Annie Leibovitz”. A Photographer’s Life (1990-2005)’, presented at the Brooklyn Museum of Art … in New York and at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, looked back on the following fifteen years of career of the North American photographer, living legend and myth of the art of the still image. In accordance with this chronological guideline, three decades later, the book “Wonderland”, published in 2021, again included a retrospective of the North American visual artist. It is this publication which now takes the form of an exhibition “Annie Leibovitz in Wonderland”, from the hand of Corunna MOP Foundation, show the public more than half a century of tireless and dazzling photographic work.
Leibovitz began his career doing portraits –I won’t say “emblematic”, a most obvious redundancy– rock and roll stars in the 70s, for Rolling Stone magazine, making the leap into fashion over the next decade, first in the pages of Vanity Fair, then in Vogue, under the direction of her friend Anna Wintour.
Hyperactive woman, dedicated to the glamor of celebrities or slender bodies as well as to social causes and even war conflicts, series dedicated to the most diverse themes, from athletes to itinerant musicians, from anonymous and autonomous women with Susan Sontag, her conflicted life partner, to more or less scandalous nudes but loaded with sensuality or images of war.
Apart from the long series on the American tour of the Rolling Stones in 1975, presented in archive form in the form of black and white contacts, perhaps poorly suited to the exhibition space of the Battery Dock, the most interesting are his portraits of personalities and his major fashion reports, two photographic genres that merge and blend together in front of your camera.
Exterior of the exhibition, at the Battery Dock in La Coruña
First and foremost, the one which gives title and meaning to this entire retrospective, the report “Alice in Wonderland”, produced for Vogue in a forest in the Parisian countryside in 2003, where, among other things, the characters and situations from the famous story of Lewis Carroll, himself a photographer, are recreated. A riot of photogenic imagination and visual fantasy starring model Natalia Vodionova as Alice, Karl Lagerfeld as the Duchess, Marc Jacobs as the Blue Caterpillar and John Galliano as the Queen of Hearts herself.
A recognizable fiction
If we have always said that fashion reports tell us stories, that of Annie Leibovitz is in itself an easily recognizable fiction, this fantasy in whichwe go through the looking glass to immerse ourselves in other possible or impossible worldsto whom the photographer takes us in each of his photos. Leibovitz confessed that it was Susan Sontag who read Carrol’s story to her in its entirety and helped her understand it in all its depth, introducing her to these imaginary worlds of fairy tales that she would represent in reports like “The Wizard of Oz” for Vogue in 2005 or in the ingenious campaign for Disney in 2007, also coinciding with the childhood of her three daughters.
There is something improvised in the assembly of this MOP Foundation exhibition which had accustomed us to the demand for sophistication and perfectionism: the reproductions, of uneven quality, are pinned to the wall with thumbtacks; There are virtually no signs or legends to guide the visitor; There is apparently no order or concert in the succession of clichés… Maybe it’s intentional chaos and a sense of carelessness, an aesthetic option of the exhibition discourse itself, but such an option is very inappropriate for a photographer who takes so much care with her original portraits of the most notable celebrities of the post-contemporary world.
Roland Barthes argued that fashion photography was essentially scenography, a statement that takes on a particularly relevant meaning in large North American portraits, where the setting is as important, if not more so, than the subject represented, off-center and sometimes almost hidden. Leibovitz surrounds his characters with baroque settings, creating around them a dreamlike atmosphere with a pictorial treatment, perhaps traces of his early fine arts studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.
famous faces
The baroque style overflows into the sumptuous room in which John Galliano takes a bath, in the background, surrounded by a swarm of decorative objects – mirrors, sculptures, paintings, bottles, perfumes, lamps – which occupy the foreground, while Tom Ford He lives in a slightly more minimalist and modern space but in which he has not given up the accumulation of objects on his desk, exactly as is the case in the case of Anna Wintour, with his back turned, in front of a large window full of frames with photographs and with the skyscrapers in the background.
The red dress Karen Elson dazzles against the old gold of the sumptuous rococo furniture. More classic are the painting and the hunting trophies which frame the actor Ben Stiller sunk in red velvet cushions and on whose body rests a mannequin dressed in a dress of the same shade. As he does in his portraits of large groups, the image of George Clooney directing a nighttime fashion shoot, she is surrounded by naked models, like Rubens’s nymphs, who distract the attention of the snapshot’s protagonist.
Improvisation, involuntary laziness or conscious aesthetic and discursive choice, Annie Leibovitz revisits the world she experienced in La Coruña, this world of wonders into which he invites us to penetrate through the mirror that is each of his images.
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