KEY POINTS:
Annie Leibovitz might be art royalty but her celebrity shots are mere varnished fiction. As a new London retrospective demonstrates, her photographs only come alive when stardom is forgotten and real people enter the frame.
In America, where Leibovitz is as recognisable as the Statue of Liberty, six foot in her sneakers with trademark mane and outsize specs, she is not just royal iconographer to the famous, she is the hallmark of celebrity itself. But in Britain she is better known for asking the Queen to take off her crown and getting a dusty answer in response.
Now might therefore seem the ideal moment for a British retrospective, the chance to discover why Americans are so eager to enter the Leibovitz Hall of Fame, otherwise known as the Thanksgiving issue of Vanity Fair, in which the great, the good and the soon-to-be-forgotten appear in full-bleed spreads without the annoying interference of text. Or why presidents and poets are as willing as socialites to submit themselves to her starry lens.
But a curious thing occurs at the National Portrait Gallery - and I hope this is deliberate - they trip your expectations from the start by displaying the shots of the Queen before anything else, so you see the photographer unusually challenged.
These images show Elizabeth at her best, calmly resisting the occasion, unaffected by the supposed honour and completely unrevealed; and they show Leibovitz at her worst: her most predictable. Since this is the twilight of Elizabeth's reign, she is photographed by twilight, shadows falling on the panoply of state, storm clouds gathering behind her mute form. Anyone hoping for insight, depth or character might as well look at a second-class English stamp.
And it turns out to be exactly the same with American royals. Robert De Niro sits on his throne in the swanky darkness (king of the cinema). The pioneering theatre director Robert Wilson holds a glowing light bulb (man of ideas).
This is portraiture at its most old-fashioned, fit for the book cover or the gallery wall, except that it lacks the insights of a Rubens or van Dyck. Its strengths are sometimes graphic - Mick Jagger as a dark satyr on a white bed, Arnold Schwarzenegger as a black silhouette, improbably muscular against the snowline - and sometimes compositional, as when she photographs spreadeagled athletes or reclining ballerinas.
But there is even less revelation of character here, just a parade of all-out American strength. The basketball player leaps to the skies, the diver plunges from the topmost board, the dancer corkscrews the pirouette.
Leibovitz is better known, of course, for more elaborate scenarios - Whoopi Goldberg bathing in asses' milk; Cindy Crawford as Eve. Each image is produced in Hollywood conditions with teams of assistants, banks of lights, props and, in the case of Vanity Fair, journalists filing location reports. But these are no more eloquent in their narratives than a shot of George W Bush grinning in the Oval Office.
Only those for whom celebrity means nothing give anything back of themselves to Leibovitz: Eudora Welty in her nineties, frail but vividly curious about this stranger and her camera; Oseola McCarty, whose life as a Mississippi washerwoman and philanthropist is powerfully encapsulated in the sweet strength of her face.
There is one piercing revelation: Colin Powell has tears in his eyes; present and correct yet far, far away.
Commercial Leibovitz is all surface, but there is more to this show. Interspersed throughout are family photographs and quotations in which Leibovitz comes across as a woman aiming for some degree of self-knowledge. Her words are flat yet sporadically revealing: that she resented smiling for family snaps; that she is too busy looking at her sitters to bother talking to them; that she photographed the corpse of her lover, Susan Sontag, in a trance.
The high point of this show is a crowded gallery in which life and work are opposed on facing walls in the form of out-takes and provisional shots. Liberated from the need to produce a varnished fiction, Leibovitz appears to notice much more: Brian Wilson like a sleepwalker by his pool, her mother sashaying as she washes the dishes - details that don't get into the definitive portraits for which she is famous. The gallery is like a vast flick-book in which the people at last come alive.
- OBSERVER
