The Australian


WHEN I'm asked about my work, I try to explain that there is no mystery involved.



Annie Leibovitz at Work - Jonathan Cape, 240pp, $69.95

It is work. But things happen all the time that are unexpected, uncontrolled, unexplainable, even magical.

The work prepares you for the moment.’’ Annie Leibovitz writes this near the end of her new book and it aligns her closely with great American photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange was a poet of the photograph and was the most expressive of the remarkable black-and-white American photographers of the 1930s. Leibovitz owns a vintage print of Lange’s, taken on Route 54 in southern New Mexico in 1938. It shows a road disappearing into the far distance, the implication being, although the road is empty, that many people impoverished by the Depression had and would travel that road, or one very like it, in search of shelter, work and food.

Robert Frank was also a great admirer of Lange and photographed the equally long and straight Route 285 in the ’50s. He was travelling to find his subjects and possibly, as an associate of the Beats, to find himself in them, foreigner that he was.

Leibovitz saw Frank as a hero when she was studying at art school 10 years later. His travels across the US captured the people in a way that seemed more real than the gloss that post-war American society wished to put on contemporary life. Through Frank’s work she came to know and appreciate the subtleties of Lange.

Leibovitz is, therefore, an heir to the rich lineage of 20th-century American photography and this is revealed in this book of the thoughtful meditations on specific photographs she has taken and the way she has taken them.

It is a beautiful book to hold and handle. It’s not like Leibovitz’s last, enormous book A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 , which accompanied the eponymous sprawling exhibition. Nor is it like Women, from 1999, which was big and bold, and included an essay by Susan Sontag.

At Work is good for portable reading. You don’t have to put it on a strong table, you can hold it in your hands, the images are intimately scaled and the words are transcriptions from interviews with the photographer. Her distinctive voice, which most would have heard first in the 2006 television documentary made by her sister, is clear and strong. It’s that peculiarly American voice: the heart is worn on the sleeve, guileless yet focused and confident.

Leibovitz worked early in her career with Hunter S. Thompson, as well as with Tom Wolfe, whom she photographed in 1972 in his car, as Frank did his travelling companions nearly 20 years earlier. As much as Leibovitz admires Frank, she never emulates his gritty furtiveness: her subjects are more likely to appear to be relaxed, at play, open to her and to the camera.

To what extent Leibovitz learned from her long association with Sontag is hard to assess. Sontag is just a whisper in this book with one late portrait taken in Paris in 2003 and references to the journey to Sarajevo in 1993. This is quite unlike Leibovitz’s vast touring exhibition, A Photographer’s Life, which included photographs of Sontag at every stage of her later years, illnesses and death, including photographs of her corpse.

For the photographer, that show and editing the accompanying book allowed her to work through her grief over Sontag’s death in 2004 and that of her father in 2005. It was a searing and overloaded book. This, by contrast, is concise and finds depth in being so.

As Liebovitz notes, she grew up ‘‘looking at the world through a frame. The frame was the window of our family’s car as we travelled from one military base to another.’’ Her perspective has always been the dichotomy between the still in relation to a face and the personality, which is never still.

This is a book about family, a family made up of images, whether of her parents, her eldest daughter or the people Leibovitz has photographed through time. That ‘‘family’’ includes Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom Leibovitz first photographed in 1975. Discussing the remarkable picture of him on a white horse at Malibu in 1988, Leibovitz expresses some ambivalence towards a photograph that is so much about form while acknowledging that for Schwarzenegger form is also a large part of content.

The truly great image of him in this book shows him perched on the ski slopes of Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1997, looking like an extra from a Leni Riefenstahl film. It’s a perfect picture of the perfect physique of a movie icon in a picturepostcard, perfect locale.

Leibovitz is less successful when she attempts nudes. Her admiration for Alfred Stieglitz’s nude portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe should have given her the insight to understand that this genre is not hers. Nor are her complex tableaus of the famous anything more than logistically complex.

With few exceptions her forte is the face and what she can do with it.

For nearly 30 years she has been ‘‘placing her subject in the middle of an idea’’ and her best magazine work is included: Nicole Kidman, Whoopi Goldberg, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Smith. Unlike Richard Avedon, Leibovitz has never wanted to go in so close and to strip her subjects back but this sensitivity sometimes makes her work, especially her fashion work, seem mannered. The sole exception in this book is the marvellous portrait of Kirsten Dunst at Versailles wearing an extravagant black ball gown that looks to be made out of plastic garbage bags.

The twists and turns of Leibovitz’s career have taken her to the O. J. Simpson murder trial, on the road with the Rolling Stones, to photograph some of the most famous people in the late 20th century and to cover the horrifying aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Through it all she has never lost her love of, or belief in, the medium. She notes: ‘‘You may think that you can’t compete with the barrage of images on television, but the individual pictures have their own impact. You can study them. They remain.’’