Another Fashion Disaster

Chain of Command ~ The National Guard’s 69th Infantry was instrumental in delivering food and water to those hardest hit from its base at the Lexington Avenue Armory—and keeping a nearby hospital running. Photograph © Annie Leibovitz/Vogue  - From the series: Storm Troopers.

I hardly am a fan of fashion photography or of the more general preoccupation with glamor. I've made that plain here many times before. My objections are not just that the industry exploits and endangers teen girls. Indeed, the urge to exploit seems to recognize no bounds. Now, apparently, when fashion photographers and editors exercise questionable judgement, exploiting hardship and suffering for fun and profit, everything is OK just so long as their melding of models and militarism rises to the level of "not wince inducing?" I will grant that Anie Leibovitz's new series for Vogue perhaps is not as politically tone deaf as several made in recent years by, say, Rankin, or, worse, Steve Meisel. Indeed, it may not be as bad as some of the recent projects she herself has undertaken. So what? If you set the lower bound of offensiveness low enough, anyone can clear it.

All that seems to be lost on Rosie Swash who in this column at The Guardian operates less as a journalist than an enabler. Her claim that, because Vogue worked with other fashion industry types to raise funds for disaster relief, they have "earned the right" to exploit calamity to boost circulation numbers is, to be polite, facile. Imagine the uproar if the scruffy activists at Occupy Sandy made an analogous claim! The Occupy volunteers gave time and effort not just money. Swash, in other words,  is making excuses for the well-planned-out bad behavior of the folks who ultimately pay her salary. No fashion mags, no 'runway,' no need for Rosie's column. And, of course, absent the photographers and models and agencies, the 'industry' could not function. Hence, no need for Rosie's column. Pretty simple.

As a matter of substance, it is indeed an open question whether the various men in uniform delivered more "official" aid to those displaced or injured by the recent hurricane than, for instance, the Occupy Sandy activists. Even the Daily News, recognized the contributions the volunteers have made. And, as Rebecca Solnit has argued in A Paradise Built in Hell, that is part of a broad historical pattern.* It is no disrespect to "first responders" in uniform to suggest that much of the most immediate and most effective response to disaster comes from regular people, unpaid, in civvies.
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* Rebecca Solnit. 2010. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking. You can find my assessment of her argument here.

Mieko Mahi and the Enterprise of Ideology

Abstract pipe rack. Photograph © Mieko Mahi.

I came across this brief notice of work by Mieko Mahi at the web page of ABC News. On her own web page she trumpets herself (putatively in the words of others) as 'the Annie Liebovitz of the oil and gas industry'. That seems apt to me. I've been pretty clear here that Leibovitz is a talented woman who places her efforts at the service of vacuous celebrity. Mahi herself notes that she "caters" to the energy industry in much the same way - producing glossy images to divert attention from the underlying mess. After all, extraction of oil and natural gas is not pretty. I recommend Mahi's work as an example of ideology - how to render the slippery, black, dangerous basis of pervasive degradation, penury, violence and conflict all sparkly and shiny and bright. No wonder the industry types love her work! Interesting too is how the folks at ABC present her beautifying enterprise more or less without comment.

Best Shots (185) ~ Annie Leibovitz

(212) Annie Leibovitz ~ Georgia O'Keefe's Pastels (22 November 2011).

Leibovitz-Kardashian, Incorporated?

So, is this news really so depressing? It surely is not terribly surprising? The wages of profligacy and poor judgement for Annie.

Petra Collins & Thylane Loubry Blondeau ~ Does It Make a Difference Who Is Behind the Camera? Or Only Who Is In Front of It?

Both images © Petra Collins.

I have posted here repeatedly on questions of exploitation, sexism, and censorship. You can follow the various labels below for samplings. And I tend to be pretty harsh about adults who use teenage girls for their own enrichment. I also tend to be pretty damning of male fashion photographers who manage to eroticize war, torture and violence - all for fun and profit. Blah, blah, blah. I make exceptions and always take umbrage at conservative politicians who endorse censorship (and curators or photographers who embrace self-censorship) too.


So, here is a question: If you have a bunch of images of teenage girls, taken in clearly provocative poses, do you object? What if the girls are in various states of undress? What if the girl is - like Thylane Loubry Blondeau - just ten but her mother thinks it is OK (it is Vogue, after all!)? What if the photographer is herself a teenage girl? As I have said previously, I actually think the issue is less sex than the venality of adults and publishers and handlers (agents and agencies).

Rogues Gallery?

January ~ Blackwater security founder Erik Prince.
Photograph by Nigel Parry.

January ~ Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein and C.O.O. Gary Cohn.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

May ~ General David Petraeus.
Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.

It is funny how I discover things on the Internet. My nominee for the least charitable, most self-indulgent, resentful essay on photography ever is Ingrid Sischey's 1991 trashing in The New Yorker, of Sebastião Salgado.* It is a paper so incoherent, so devoid of plausible judgment, I've always wondered how the editors allowed it to see print.

Sischey, of course, has gone on to distinguish herself as editor of that bastion of serious thought and incisive commentary ~ Interview magazine. She now has ascended to the post of contributing editor at Vanity Fair. All this demonstrates that early failure is no barrier to success in the world of vacuous publishing ventures. It also establishes how easy it is to squander whatever meagre abilities you might have on thoroughly specious undertakings while still feeling justified in voicing sanctimonious criticisms of those who try, at least, to put their more substantial talent to productive use. I suppose that is the risk of swimming always in the shallow end of the pool.

I already have devoted enough time to Sischey here. So, . . . end of that rant. My point, in any case, is that for some reason my Google alerts flagged this interview with Sischey about what to do at Art Basel/Miami. And on the same page is a link to a photo essay: Vanity Fair’s Year in Review: January to June 2010. And that slide show is what I really wanted to talk about. How is that for circuitous?

The bulk of the VF half year review consists of pics of entertainers and their enablers (read Hollywood actors and directors). But, interspersed with tie sideshow, are the three images lifted here; they deserve comment.** We have, in order, rabid mercenary, rapacious financiers, and . . . well, everyone's hero, the good General David Petraeus. This seems to me to constitute a real slap at the General. Don't get me wrong, I've made it clear here more than once that I don't hold him in terribly high regard. But there are limits. Petraeus may be misguided, he may be committed to pursuing a losing policy in an authoritarian decision-making structure, but he is not a venal, ideologue like Prince or simply venal like the the boys from Goldman Sachs. That makes him culpable but probably not criminal. You cannot say the same of Prince, Blankfein, and Cohn. Apparently, our media have more or less completely lost the capacity to discriminate not just between the serious and the ephemera, but between between the honest (if deluded) and the crooks.

I have to say that one of the virtues of Blankfein and Cohn is that, as bald bankers, they deprived Leibovitz of the signature fan-induced, wind-swept hair that renders so many of her portraits formulaic.
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* If, after this characterization, you want to read it, you can find Sischey's essay reprinted in Liz Heron & Val Williams, eds. 1996. Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850's to the Present. Duke University Press.

** All three images © the photographers noted in the Vanity Fair caption/credit.

Disaster Avoided

It appears that Annie Leibovitz has avoided complete financial disaster. Although she has been as irresponsible" as many less renowned people who do not get bailed out by wealthy benefactors, this is a good outcome. And, as in past posts on the saga [1] [2], I still wonder why The New York Times continues to insist on classifying this as a story about the arts rather than as a story about economics.

Reprieve

So, according to this report yesterday in The New York Times, it appears that Annie Leibovitz has averted the worst - at least for now. She has not lost her home or control of the copyright to her work. Regular readers will know that I am pretty ambivalent about Leibovitz and her work. That said, this is a good outcome and I hope she can dig her way all the way out of this financial hole.

And that raises a matter that I've noted here before. The editors at The Times finally have filed this story in the Arts section. This is a tale about the political economy of the photo industry and how treacherous that terrain can be. But the Arts and artists hardly stand aloof from such pressures and it is sheer ideology to present the world as though they do.

Why is This Not a Story About Art?

The attempted gerrymander continues. When we talk about "art" and "artists" we must do so as though they are unsullied - except, perhaps, when talking about "tortured" artists and their personal foibles and tribulations. We never, ever want to suggest that art is a business, let alone that it is - horrors! - thoroughly political. So, The New York Times runs three stories about Annie Leibovitz [1] [2] [3] in the course of two days. Each report deals with the intimate ways that Leibovitz's art is thoroughly entangled in business.

Leibovitz is a terrific photographer. No doubt about that. I even am willing to say that much of her work, although often done for commercial clients and contributing to the cult of celebrity that plagues us, is art. (But aren't such judgments political?) The thing to notice about the current episode is that the editors at The Times did not place a single one of these stories in the Arts section of the paper. That would require them, and us, to acknowledge in some explicit way that works of art - Leibovitz's portraits and the rights to them - are commodities and that, as such, they get entangled in all sorts of sordid legal and financial goings on.* You can't have that!
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* This is not the first time I have noted indecorous topics in relation to Leibovitz and her work. In fact, I've commented here numerous times.

Annie Leibovitz's Ongoing Financial Travails

The sad story, reported in The Guardian, is here.

Poor Annie Goes to the Pawn Shop

From The Guardian today ~ this frightening report:

"Annie Leibovitz, the celebrated New York photographer who has captured many of the most memorable images of the icons of Hollywood and Washington over the past 30 years, is not the kind of person usually associated with going to a pawn shop. But it seems that in these extraordinary times even the likes of Leibovitz need to find cash in extraordinary places.

The photographer, whose pictures of Michelle Obama adorn the March cover of Vogue, has turned to a company called Art Capital that specialises in lending money with fine art as the collateral.

The New York Times disclosed today that Leibovitz has borrowed about $15m (£10m) from the firm in two separate tranches.

Public records show that she secured the loan partly against property she owns, but also by putting up as collateral the copyright, negatives and contract rights to every photograph she has ever taken or will take in future.

Such an exceptional step, involving in essence the pawning of her entire life's work, may in Leibovitz's case be explained by the tumultuous few years she has been through. Her long-time friend Susan Sontag died in 2004, and she has been in costly litigation over the renovation of some of her properties."

Why frightening? Because even when she was relatively flush Leibovitz seemed to have no boundaries when it comes to pumping air into our over-inflated celebrity worship (e.g., [1] [2] [3] [4]). I suspect all propriety will now fall by the wayside.

A Pox on All Your Houses

Miley Cyrus ~ Photograph © Annie Leibovitz /Vanity Fair

I've resisted the temptation to enter this photo-fracas. Why? I have only sons. I therefore am not tuned into the intricacies of pre-adolescent girl "culture"; until today, I have had a corresponding - and quite blissful - ignorance of all things Hannah Montana. From this vantage point, one thing seems clear. Miley Cyrus, the 15 year old girl who plays Hannah is being poorly served by all the adults around her. You can find the gist here.

The folks at Disney Channel, who peddle Hannah relentlessly, are shocked, simply shocked that anyone would consider exploiting so impressionable a young girl for crass commercial purposes! They are stomping about because of the current Vanity Fair photos of Cyrus which, they say, exploit the girl in order to, of all things, sell magazines. But the DC folk are simply worried about their investment. No more, no less. They will quiet down once it becomes clear that the scandalous shots lead to increased sales of Hannah paraphernalia. In that sense they are just like the folks at VF who, indeed, are simply out to sell a crappy magazine, even if that means publishing tawdry pictures of an adolescent girl. What a controversy! Hypocrites all around.

Meanwhile Cyrus's handlers and, worse, her parents seem to have put her smack into the middle of all this. There was nothing amiss at the time the pictures were taken (the parents and handlers attest to that; after all, they were there!). Nor was there really anything wrong even up till the time that the DC folk started to complain ~ in response, of course, to the disillusionment and dismay (feigned or otherwise) of fans and their parents. Now the photo shoot seems embarrassing, or something. On this one, Annie Leibovitz, who made the pictures, has proven herself even more shameless than I imagined she could be. The girl is 15, Annie. Even if she's surrounded by jackasses, do you need to join them?

Finally, to all of the parents out there whining because Hannah is supposed to be a role model to your little girls, look elsewhere than the television set. There is no "betrayal" here; just another teenage girl being used by adults, yourselves included. My advice? Find a real role model for your daughter. Even better, try being one yourself and get rid of the set.
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PS: Added later that evening ~ You might be interested in these short essays on the Hannah scandal by Germaine Greer, Viv Groskop & Stuart Jeffries over at The Guardian.

Transcending Race?

Perhaps when they see this Annie Leibovitz Vogue (April 08) cover, the French will wonder why one of their recent cover stories has been criticized as racially troubling. After all, they are French and can't be expected to be attuned to the racial stereotypes at large in the U.S.! But given that Barak Obama has just spoken of how his own (white) grandmother admitted to being fearful of strange black men whom she passed on the street, it seems that worries about stereotypes of "dangerous black male" remain salient. Well, some writers have criticised the Leibovitz cover as racist because it portrays a black man and white woman together in just that seemingly charged way. The man and woman here are NBA star LeBron James and model Gisele Bundchen. Here is James's response: "Everything my name is on is going to be criticized in a good way or bad way. . . . Who cares what anyone says?" I have offered enough criticism of fashion photography generally and Leibovitz here before to pass on this one. But while James may not care what I say, too bad. Here are some off-the-top-of -the-head comments.

First, I guess I wonder how this photograph is any more racist or sexist than professional sports or fashion modelling generally. That is a topic for another time. Second, the ruckus seems to be about the expression on James's face. But Bundchen has a look so vacant as to be quite disconcerting. Moreover, it seems to me that she is virtually photoshopped into the image - her hair has that bizarre Annie-esque windblown look as though she is laying on her back and notice that James's left hand is barely touching her. Finally, I don't see why James couldn't have been decked out in sharp duds instead of shorts and sneaks. I know, I know, the "story" is about good bodies. Good bodies look good in nice clothes too. (Thanks Stan B!)

ENOUGH Already About Susan and Annie

Lindsay Lohan © Annie Leibovitz

Cultured types - those who read, say, the NYRB or The Nation or The New York Times, but never, ever openly or un-ironically, read rags like People or worse - regularly tut-tut pop culture celebs who insist on, or are unable to resist, parading their foibles and self-absorption in public. We look pityingly at Paris and Lindsay and Britney and the serial car-wrecks that pass for their lives.

Susan Sontag © Annie Leibovtz

There is a pretty astounding level of hypocrisy at work here though. Instead of the tabloids we obsess over the "memoirs" of heroes, whether literary or artistic, and their survivors. This is a topic I have skirted several times and, in each instance - here and here and here - I've tried to be charitable. But I have really grown weary of the obsession with Susan Sontag, her anxieties, and the exhibitionism of her circle. Her son apparently has a new memoir preoccupied with detailing the difficulty his mom had acknowledging that perhaps she was not quite so special or extraordinary after all. And her "companion" apparently is the subject of a new film seeking to establish that she is extraordinary.

Let's be clear Susan Sontag was a smart, articulate, often insightful woman. Annie Leibovitz is a talented photographer. As for David Rieff, from what I can figure, he is mostly an example of how the smart gene can be recessive. But Sontag also often was an incredibly irritating writer and was wrong about a lot. Leibovitz consistently has chosen to use her talent to shore up what Sontag derisively called our "culture of celebrity." (I am unsure how to calculate the degrees of separation, or if near misses like this even count, but if you Google Spears Leibovitz you will discover that, impressed by photos Annie had taken of Tom and Katie and their baby, a couple of years ago Brit had explored the possibility of getting Annie to photograph her son.) As I have noted here before, Sontag, seemingly unaware of the irony, tossed that phrase as an epithet at those she chose to criticize. This latest round of promotion and self-promotion makes the way Sontag relied on that epithet seem incredibly shallow and shabby.

Hey! Look At Me!

In The Guardian yesterday you can find this story on photographer Elinor Carucci who seems to specialize in providing too much visual information about herself, her family, and her relationships. This sort of exhibitionism strikes me a wholly self-indulgent and completely uninteresting. Carucci, an Israeli immigrant to NYC, claims that "No place is home now" and that her photography affords her "a personal point of view." Fine.

"And If I Don’t Get Enough Attention" (2002) © Elinor Carucci

In this appropriately titled self-portrait Carucci appears with her husband. She doesn't provide much indication about why anyone should care. I don't.

One point of comparison would be Annie Leibovitz who was widely criticized for over-sharing in her recent book A Photographer's Life. (See my earlier post on this.) But Leibovitz offers the personal work in that collection as some sort of exercise in remembrance in the wake of her friend and lover Susan Sontag's death. She largely has focused her creative energies on others and so seems to me to not even inhabit the same terrain of self-absorption as Carucci. (Nor is Carucci likely to be in the same category talent-wise as Leibovitz; we'll see.) I am not much interested in the sort of celebrity photography that Leibovitz produces. I guess what I find irritating about Carucci is that she seems to be trying, through revelation of her now-not-private-life, to elbow her way in to the celebrity crowd, most of whom are vacuous anyhow. Her work, which seems to be hailed as 'emotionally intense,' 'revealingly intimate' and so forth, seems to me like it will be in its element among the celebs. Why not work at becoming an accomplished photographer and accept whatever recognition or attention follows from that?

Annie & Susan - "a love story."

It sems like the photographic "event" this fall is the appearance of Annie Leibovitz's A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 (Random House) and the exhibition of the same work at the Brooklyn Museum starting later this month. You can find stories in The New York Times and The Guardian [ and Open Democracy].

Leibovitz is a truly talented photographer (I am certain she will be relieved finally to hear my assessment!). The images in this book make that quite clear. One major focus of this work is Leibovitz's personal life and particularly her relationship with Susan Sontag. As Leibovitz recently said in an interview for The Times, “With Susan it was a love story.” The other evening I had the chance to look through the new book and it is clear from the pictures of Sontag that Leibovitz includes that that statement really captures their life together. It is in many ways incredibly touching. Despite the complaints to which the press acconts allude, I admire Leibovitz for publishing the book.

I am surprised to find myself saying that because, despite her many intellectual and political virtues, more often than not I found Sontag's views on photograpahy maddeningly wrongheaded. I have said as much in a previous post and at much greater length in one of the papers I've posted in the sidebar here. Moreover, I don't much like many of Leibovitz's photographic preoccupations. For instance, as The Guardian correspondent says in setting up her story: "She [Leibovitz] is not long returned from her most recent, hugely publicised shoot of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and their baby at their ranch in Colorado." To say that I could not care less would be charitable.

So here is where things get a bit dicey. My qualms begin with Sontag's essay "A Photograph is Not an Opinion, Or Is It?," originally written as a sort of introduction for Leibovitz's Women (Random House), which I first read in Sontag's collection of essays Where the Stress Falls (FSG, 2001). At that point I (being a bumpkin from the provinces) didn't know that Sontag and Leibovitz in fact were sharing a life. And I couldn't figure for the life of me why Sontag was so effusive. I plan to go back and re-read the essay and look again at the pictures. Perhaps I can better see the affinities that escaped me last time. I'm not so sure.

Why? In Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag criticizes Sebastiao Salgado's Migrations project for being "complicit, if inadvertantly, in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph," namely one of anonymous suffering. I think this complaint is completely off base, but will not rehearse my reasons here. What I found astonishing when I first read it is that Sontag, herself clearly, if perhaps inadvertantly, a beneficiary of the "cult of celebrity," could level such a charge against others, let alone Salgado. What I find even more astonishing is that she could accuse anyone of complicity in that cult of celebrity while at the same time singing the praises of Leibovitz who has made her career by contributing - not at all "inadvertantly" - to precisely the celebration of celebrity that Sontag apparently found so distasteful. I guess maybe astonishing is not the proper word. This, however, is not the proper place to say what I really think. It might distract from the love story.

[Thanks fo Peter Loewen for prompting me on this post.]
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PS: ADDED 10/11/06. It seems that there is a bit too much preoccupation with just what sort of relationship Sontag & Leibovitz actually had. In The Guardian story we are told: "In public at least, they never referred to themselves as a couple. "Words like 'companion' and 'partner' were not in our vocabulary," Leibovitz says. "We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still 'friend'."" The problem is that with celebrity comes the familiar sort of People titillation with such matters. It is the cost of extraordinary privilege I suppose. I think that this is a love story and a touching one. It is a wonderful tale of emotional and intellectual connection. So, while it may seem ironic for me to say this having spent time writing about it, everyone should leave the two women alone.