Leigh Youdale
Well-known
There's currently an "International" Annie Liebovitz exhibition at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art which I attended on Sunday. I have to say it was a disappointment.
Certainly there was a representative showing of some of her large iconic celebrity portraits with which we're all familiar - too familiar perhaps. But a large proportion of the exhibit was comprised of small (about 5x4) mono prints of her family members. They were quite without merit and the sort of thing that almost anyone could produce from their family snapshot album. Nothing about them indicated that we were looking at work supposed to be representative of a major photographic artist. They were just plain ordinary.
Another major part of the exhibit were series of small photographs of Susan Sontag, especially depicting her slow death from cancer. Highly personal to Sontag and Liebovitz, perhaps, but not very appropriate to a public in Australia.
Her few landscapes were poor and would have been better left out of the show.
Whether the content of the exhibition reflects the fact that Liebovitz has lost control of most of her images after selling the rights to them to pay off her debts, I don't know.
The whole exhibition was self indulgent and second rate in my view. The $15 I paid was not worth it. Had she not had the good fortune to get access to celebrities through the magazines she was commissioned by and given the budgets to create the setups she used she would not have become famous at all. She must have talked a good game!
In contrast, at the NSW State Library it was the last day of a major exhibition of an Australian photographer's work, Jeff Carter, who took to the back roads in 1946 and spent much of his life photographing the battlers in our rural areas. Not unlike the Farm Administration photographs of earlier years in the USA. This exhibition was a retrospective (Jeff died last year) was free and of much greater interest and content.
Certainly there was a representative showing of some of her large iconic celebrity portraits with which we're all familiar - too familiar perhaps. But a large proportion of the exhibit was comprised of small (about 5x4) mono prints of her family members. They were quite without merit and the sort of thing that almost anyone could produce from their family snapshot album. Nothing about them indicated that we were looking at work supposed to be representative of a major photographic artist. They were just plain ordinary.
Another major part of the exhibit were series of small photographs of Susan Sontag, especially depicting her slow death from cancer. Highly personal to Sontag and Liebovitz, perhaps, but not very appropriate to a public in Australia.
Her few landscapes were poor and would have been better left out of the show.
Whether the content of the exhibition reflects the fact that Liebovitz has lost control of most of her images after selling the rights to them to pay off her debts, I don't know.
The whole exhibition was self indulgent and second rate in my view. The $15 I paid was not worth it. Had she not had the good fortune to get access to celebrities through the magazines she was commissioned by and given the budgets to create the setups she used she would not have become famous at all. She must have talked a good game!
In contrast, at the NSW State Library it was the last day of a major exhibition of an Australian photographer's work, Jeff Carter, who took to the back roads in 1946 and spent much of his life photographing the battlers in our rural areas. Not unlike the Farm Administration photographs of earlier years in the USA. This exhibition was a retrospective (Jeff died last year) was free and of much greater interest and content.
