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Thursday, February 01, 2007

One Deadweight Deserves Another

Here's a companion volume for this one, about which I blogged a couple of weeks ago.

The first book had text; this second one has pictures. The pictures - photos - are by Annie Leibovitz. From the New Republic's review:

[T]his whole book -- heavier than many newborn babies -- is what someone like Leibovitz wants to be seen as, and what her magazines urge upon us: rich but natural; famous but ordinary; beautiful but mortal; a still photograph, but going on forever; a celebrity but decent. It is a delicious recipe, but hard to digest. So, really, it's a matter of when you find yourself throwing up over these gravure pages. Don't lift the book without help, and don't browse it on a full stomach.


Not merely a deadweight, Leibovitz's book features pictures of dying and dead Susan Sontag:

...[T]here are pictures .... of Sontag dying, and then of Sontag dead on a mortuary table, where she is not recognizable. Even the most celebrated looks can dwindle at the end, and be destroyed by pain.

These pictures are distant and stricken, as well they might be. But an air of question sticks to them -- should Leibovitz be taking these pictures? It is far from clear that at the end she was "with" Sontag as she had been before. Grapple with this passage from the preface:

"I forced myself to take pictures of Susan's last days. 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."

And this:

"I began searching for photographs of her [Sontag] to put in a little book that was intended to be given to the people who came to her memorial service. The project was important to me, because it made me feel close to her and helped me to begin to say good-bye. I found so many things I didn't remember or perhaps had not even seen before. I also began looking at all the photographs I had taken of the rest of my family. My father had been ill for some time, and I had flown down to Florida to be with him after spending Christmas in the hospital with Susan. She died before I could get back. He died six weeks later."

So Leibovitz was busy and she was not quite with Sontag at the end. Some alteration in their relationship had occurred. But she does not mention this, as if access might be at issue. She told Charlie Rose that she doubted whether Sontag would have wanted the final pictures to be shown. I think that must be taken to mean that Leibovitz had no clearance for them.

I do not mean to be squeamish, or to say that pictures of people dying or in extremis are forbidden. But I see a shadow of guilt or doubt over these pictures, something that obscures or traduces love. And this makes the pictures morally vulnerable. It leaves them in danger of seeming like voyeuristic shots of death's moment, which is the most individualized, the most private, moment of all. Without consent, they seem to me unpublishable, and much more distressing than the photographer knows. Even with consent, considerations of taste and decency might have intervened.

So I am not convinced that it is all the same life, seamless or without a bump. Annie Leibovitz is a very modest photographer. Her skills are far exceeded by her access, her expenses, and the very confined "curiosity" of her employers. Alas, when she takes her "purely personal pictures," despite the welcome abandonment of finesse, the earlier problems remain. Photography, as Susan Sontag observed, is a very tricky art of appropriation, in which the photographer may too easily assume that the camera and the opportunity are responsible for what has been done. This is not so. The photographer did it. And if a thing has not been given, then sometimes it has to be stolen.


---david thomson---