Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
Memoirs of the Artist
By Joyce Carol Oates
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005
an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum,October 20, 2006–January 21, 2007.
A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005
by Annie Leibovitz
Random House, 472 pp., $75.00
Ours is an age of memoir—inevitably, faux memoir: the highly selective and enhanced employment of 'real' persons, events, and settings in the creation of a text; or, in the case of Annie Leibovitz's massive A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005, a text with photographs arranged to suggest an elegiac narrative of loss, rebirth, and spiritual transcendence. After the death of her longtime companion Susan Sontag in December 2004—depicted here in harrowing, painfully graphic images some observers may find offensive—Leibovitz set herself the task of compiling photographs for a memorial book which gradually evolved into a larger memoir of the previous fifteen years of the photographer's life: 'Going through my pictures to put this book together was like being on an archeaological dig,' she says in her introduction.
Review, 2298 words
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