Rooms of dead men's things

Enlarge Image

Annie Leibovitz leads a media tour of her exhibit Pilgrimage, in Washington on Tuesday. (JACQUELYN MARTIN / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

WASHINGTON -- The honoured living photographer poses in a suite of dead things. Behind her, we see pressed yellow flowers, the bones and skull of a pigeon, steamer trunks, riding boots, a man's high hat.

"Take away the captions, and there's some searching going on," the photographer says. "There's some searching for a reason to be alive."

This is Annie Leibovitz, the rock-star portraitist of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, an official Living Legend as designated by the Library of Congress, and a Commandeur de l'ordre des arts et des lettres of France, opening her new show at the Smithsonian.

The exhibition is called Pilgrimage. It turns out to be a rummage sale of houses, haunts and closets, plus a few frames of the Gettysburg battlefield, the cliffs of Yosemite and a greenish Niagara Falls.

The woman who famously captured the nude John Lennon curled tight to Yoko Ono, and the fabulously pregnant Demi Moore -- and more recently, scandalously, 15-year-old Miley Cyrus topless, clutching a sheet, now gives us clothing without the clothed. The only faces in the exhibition are negatives of Abraham Lincoln, and painted on Louisa May Alcott's dolls.

"Would this be a show if it wasn't Annie Leibovitz?" the curator muses. "Well, it certainly helps that it's Annie Leibovitz."

It also helps that the blossoms were Emily Dickinson's, the bird was one of Charles Darwin's specimens, the trunks carried Martha Graham's costumes, the boots were Annie Oakley's and the high hat was worn by Lincoln himself on the night he was killed.

We also see: Sigmund Freud's couch and his shelf of sex books, Elvis Presley's birthplace, tomb and bullet-shattered television, Henry David Thoreau's bedframe, Eleanor Roosevelt's sleeping porch, the Old Faithful geyser, the River Ouse, and Georgia O'Keeffe's tray of handmade chalks in the colours of old New Mexico.

Scrambling for an all-encompassing rationale for the display, the curator -- an art school dean named Andy Grundberg -- extemporizes on a theme of "an inventory of our cultural moment... a 20th-century notion of celebrity that was created by photography... a certain kind of eclecticism overall," and then, giving up, he sighs, "you can't figure it out."

But then Leibovitz -- tall, grey-blonde, approachable, wry, frank, and sparky, as she would need to be while mothering three pre-teens at the age of 62 -- addresses an invited coterie of reporters and cognoscenti. She makes it clear she embarked on this outwardly random journey through the artifacts of America's (and Britain's) fairly-distant history to save her own inner sanity, her solvency, and her soul.

"I didn't quite know what I was doing while I was doing it," she says. "I was having some financial duress, some issues. I wouldn't call it a mid-life crisis. I'd call it looking for a reason to live."

"Duress" is a euphemism. According to The New York Times, the honoured living photographer was forced in 2009 to "pawn every snap of the shutter she had made or will make" as collateral against debts in the millions.

"I always thought that if I just took pictures, everything would take care of itself, but that's not true" she says at the gallery. She assures us her financial health is stabilizing, and that revenue from Pilgrimage will allow her "to protect my portrait work, to feed my work."

When I note that her own descent into insolvency has paralleled that of the Eastan Kodak Co., which filed for Chapter 11 protection the day before this exhibition opened, she says, "Bankruptcy is not the end, for people or companies. Kodak is too much a part of us to go away."

(The irony of Kodak's demise is that it was one of the company's own research engineers, a Rensselaer classmate of mine named Steven Sasson, who was awarded the first patent for a digital camera in 1978.)

This is Annie Leibovitz's first all-digital show, an invitation to manipulation in an age when anyone with a telephone is instantly an artiste. ("I'm learning just like you are," the maestro admits. "We're all in this together, figuring this out.") Yet this is merely an enhancement of what George Eastman gave us with the first boxy Kodak back in 1888: the democratization of vision, the mirror that remembers.

"It's important to me that it tries to stay real," Leibovitz says. "But it's not real. It's a one-dimensional object."

The early photographers encouraged the parents of dying children to "Preserve the shadow, 'ere the substance fades." A century later, we walk through three rooms of dead men's things, obeying a great artist's monition that, in a writer's rag doll with a painted smile or a bullet hole in a rocker's RCA Victor, we may understand the life a stranger lived.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 4, 2012 J11