More so than other photographers with access to A-listers and the political elite, Annie Leibovitz lives among the stars. She has captured President Nixon’s abject flight from the White House, as well as a legion of artists, from Keith Haring at the peak of his fame to a gangly David Byrne. Magazine photography has never been the same since Leibovitz invited John Lennon to curl like a child around Yoko Ono on what became the last day of his life, in 1980, for Rolling Stone. Eleven years later, for that same publication, she photographed a nude, pregnant Demi Moore, revolutionizing commercial portraiture all over again.
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These images, along with 300 or so others, appear in one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of her career, on view currently at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. But don’t assume the show, which runs through January 29 before traveling to other museums, is a typical retrospective.
Most retrospectives are chronological and remain unchanged for the course of their runs. Yet as of its opening this fall, Leibovitz, 74, was still shooting images for the show. What the show is today may be different than what it was yesterday or will be, when exhibited elsewhere. That’s a testament to the trust that Alejo Benedetti, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, has placed in Leibovitz, and the power of any permutation of images she could produce.
The exhibition begins at the dawn of her career in midcentury America, segues into her cultural ascension during the roiling punk era, and ends with newly shot photographs done on commission for Crystal Bridges. Leibovitz has stressed, however, that the show is not merely a means to track the arc of her career. Instead, she told journalists, it should be an inspiration “for young photographers.”
Its first two rooms, which contain 54 years’ worth of archival materials, are “set up as a kind of aha moment for me,” she added, describing them as the shoots that taught her how to be an artist. (She refers to herself as a “conceptual photographer,” rather than a photojournalist, the term more commonly applied to her.)
The photographs she shot on commission appear here as a digital slideshow, rather than as prints. Their subjects are more glorious and remote than any cover star: space, as seen through the monitors of the NASA technicians tasked with illuminating its (largely) achromatic dust storms. Earlier this year, Leibovitz was invited into NASA’s inner sanctum in Houston, where she photographed, in addition to the monitors, the Artemis II astronauts in their orange jumpsuits and some sleek metal spacecraft.
Leibovitz is a meticulous portraitist, and her best-known pictures reintroduce celebrities in unexpected circumstances that conjure unexpected expressions. But space guards its story; there’s no face or figure to grab hold. That, I think, is what makes these images so intimate. Out of the whole sensational lot, they read like self-portraits, in the same vein of her “Pilgrimage” series. “Pilgrimage”—another commission, shot in this case for the Smithsonian between 2009 and 2011—features landscapes devoid of people: geysers and craggy cliff-sides and hermetic woods. These pictures are infinitely more mysterious than a celebrity portrait, and promise an exciting, irreverent direction for any later stages of the project.
Like most of Leibovitz’s other projects, this show, titled “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” began with a person: Alice L. Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune and founder of Crystal Bridges, who brought Leibovitz to Bentonville in 2021 to shoot her portrait. Walton then invited Leibovitz to exhibit at the museum, but Leibovitz said she would rather display new work. Walton agreed, making Crystal Bridges the first museum to commission Leibovitz to create new images for its permanent collection.
Crystal Bridges has dedicated five rooms and 5,800 square feet to the show. It turns out the institution and Leibovitz are a good match. The museum opened in 2011 with the mission of welcoming “all to celebrate the American spirit,” Olivia Walton, the museum’s board chair, told ARTnews. “We think of ourselves as a platform for diverse storytellers and different perspectives. And I think that’s exactly what this exhibition does. It captures some of the leading thinkers in our country, and celebrates them. Also, we emphasize female artists, because we are trying to tell this more inclusive story of the history of American art and history of our country.”
Some of Leibovitz’s subjects aren’t American, but they share “American” attributes, as defined (in generous terms) by Western media: charisma, individualism, ambition.
Leibovitz had free rein with her latest subjects, and the results are eclectic. Her rabbi, Angela Warnick Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, the first woman in its 180-year history to lead the Reform congregation, appears in a wispy blue shirt and pants that match the muted lake scenery. In another work, there’s the billionaire Elon Musk, shown alongside his mother Maye. According to Leibovitz, Elon agreed to the shoot, but proved elusive, inspiring her studio to call Maye for help. She got him in front of Lieboitz’s camera the next day.
Some of the most exciting work from 2023 features famous sculptors, dancers, and painters, including Julie Mehretu and Michael Heizer. The latter was photographed walking among his magnum opus, City, the vast installation in the Nevada desert that was under construction for 50 years before opening to the public. In my favorite image of that lot, Golden Lion–winning sculptor Simone Leigh sprouts like a ceramic bust from one of her signature bell-shaped raffia skirts. The Leigh and Heizer shoots stun for roughly the same reason: both picture how great artists realize complicated desires while the rest of us fumble about.
These new and recent works are projected on four monumental screens that surround the viewer. Over the 25 minutes or so it takes for the images to completely cycle, you may get whiplash from turning your head in different directions, trying to catch or study any one image. The appeal of the digital presentation is clear: the colors are crisp, and it can be easily edited. (Leibovitz, for her part, was eager for feedback on the setup during interviews.) An inquisitive viewer, however, may find this set-up wanting in clarity and context.
The author Salman Rushdie, for example, first appears on screen healthy and relaxed, and nestled among a crowd of friends. Later in the cycle, there’s a tense portrait taken sometime after the 2022 stabbing that left him blind in his right eye. This could have been a chance to study how circumstances ravage and reinvent its captives. But because it flits by so quickly, it is hard to observe much about these striking images.
Rushdie is hardly the only person Leibovitz has shot multiple times during the course of their career. In an interview, she described the process of photographing Joan Didion in the 1970s and then again toward the end of her life. “I took that [last] picture, but you know, I really didn’t want to publish it,” Leibovitz said. Both appear in this show, however, and it would be instructive to seem them hung together.
What if Leibovitz’s entire archival materials, especially the famed ones, were allowed less routine arrangements, or more challenging wall text? What is left to know about images that have been picked apart by critics for decades, and are inextricable from the American imagination? The answer can’t be ‘nothing’.
This is not to say that Leibovitz’s photography has lessened in impact. In 2023, the number of true celebrities—ones with real holds on the public consciousness—are dwindling. Leibovitz has remained a true believer in star power, however, and some of the more recent works attest to that, with appearances of Bruce Springsteen and Cindy Sherman, among others.
Old and lesser-known images of celebrities strike a chord, too. Some feature her longtime partner, the late thinker and writer Susan Sontag. In one image, an aged Sontag and her friends, both dressed as bears, can be seen galavanting in what could be the lobby of a hotel or an expensive apartment complex. They have wine flutes in one hand, cameras in the other; gazes and gestures both trained out of the picture frame, into the future.