Lin 1 Tentative Title Annie Leibovitzs A Photographers Life: 19902005: Mourning, Photography, and Tele-Intimacy Thesis Proposal Annie

Leibovitz, one of the worlds most acclaimed commercial portrait photographers, is admittedly the icon maker of today. Throughout her nearly four decades of career, Leibovitz has created indelible visual memories of the powerful and the famous, ranging from formal portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and the Bush administration, to theatrical depictions of Whoopi Goldberg splashing in a milk bath and Meryl Streep pulling her whitened face, to striking and controversial images of pregnant Demi Moore posing nude for Vanity Fair and naked John Lennon curling up in a fetal position around fully clothed Yoko Ono for Rolling Stone, to name just a few. It may come as no surprise that as Leibovitzs fame is unparalleled in popular culture, her critical reception in academia is comparably meager. Unlike Richard Avedon, whose photographs have gained the status as art, neither is Leibovitz taken seriously nor have her works been dealt with in depth by many art critics. Similarly, in 2006 when Leibovitzs retrospective collection of photographs were published in a book and an accompanying exhibition entitled A Photographers Life: 19902005, it has caused a great sensation (positive as well as negative) in popular press and among international viewers/readers, but the critical circle has largely dismissed or glossed over the book and the exhibition. A Photographers Life is remarkably different from other retrospective collections Leibovitz has published in the hybridity of its contents, part family scrapbook, part celebrity register, as one columnist somewhat mockingly described (Aletti 61). There are well known and dramatic photographs of celebrities as well as private and prosaic snapshots Leibovitz took of her family. There are, especially, surprising pictures of Leibovitz herself, pregnant at 51, posing topless in front of a mirror ( la Demi Moore); of her late partner, Susan Sontag, lounging sensually on the sofa; of her surrounded by a typewriter and scattered notes in bed; of her wrapped by nothing but a hotel sheet; of her naked, soaking in Leibovitzs bathtub and covering her mastectomized left breast with her hand; of her receiving chemotherapy and getting her signature hair cropped; of her appearing bloated and barely recognizable in the hospital; and finally of her lying lifelessly in the funeral home. Intriguingly, very few reviewers have ever discussed these interesting photographs in their own right. When they did refer to and comment on certain photographs, almost all of them merely dwelled upon Leibovitzs controversial decision in making public some of the most intimate or

Lin 2 inappropriate images of herself and Sontag. David Rieff, Sontags son and editor, bashed Leibovitz most severely for abusing his mothers trust and protested that his mother did not deserve to be humiliated posthumously by being memorialized that way in those carnival images of celebrity death taken by Annie Leibovitz (150). In a private conversation I happened to have with Abigail Solomon-Godeau, art historian and author of Photography at the Dock, she also described the Sontag photographs as sensational and expressed her disapproval of Leibovitzs editorial decision with a question that summarized the doubts of many: Do you think Leibovitz is a vulture? What is even more intriguing, however, is that as reviewers unequivocally frowned upon Leibovitzs unwarranted confessionalism, their deprecation went opposite ways. On the one hand, some, like Solomon-Godeau and Rieff, accused her of going too far in exposing Sontag at her most vulnerable and in publicizing their intimacy; on the other hand, some criticized Leibovitz (sometimes also Sontag) for never [going] far enough in coming clean about the loving nature of their lesbian relationship (Torrance 30; emphasis added), and they believed the evidence that Sontag still needed to be captioned as friend in quotation marks said everything about the inadequacy of Leibovitzs seemingly candid self-revelation (Rollyson, Whats in a Word? 60). Did Leibovitz reveal too much or did she reveal never enough? It seems that Leibovitz is in the wrong either way. Labeled as a celebrity chronicler, Leibovitz is culpable for selling Sontags last excruciating days to satisfy two of our ruling obsessions, celebrity and death (Torrance 29). Labeled as a celebrity herself, and a closeted lesbian at that, she is guilty for serving celebrity and death only, while refraining from openly submitting her personal grief story to the archive of gay literature about love and loss. It is not difficult to see that the confusion lies in the fact that Leibovitz is held responsible for two very different sets of unwritten lawsthe first being a photographers ethical responsibility to respect her subjects integrity and privacy, and the second being a lesbian celebritys obligation to turn her life experience into an educational tale in service of the gay community. Half of them seemed to be saying that there is no moral, historical, social or political value in laying bare your personal pain. Keep your grieving process at homethey seem to be implyingfor, unlike AIDS or war victims, Sontag died from cancer, and since your photographs served neither to raise awareness about a global epidemic nor to bear witness to some neglected social injustice, such public manifestation of mourning risked appearing merely self-indulgent (Aletti 62). Another half of them seemed to be saying that there is no value whatsoever in throwing open a window onto your mental journey in the realm of mourning, unless the purpose is to turn private therapy into public activism (Cvetkovich 162). We have no use of your tearsas the well known slogan Dont mourn, organize!

Lin 3 goesunless they are translated into political action. Furthermore, we find no worth in your grief story at all, because it is not a gay one. The above musings revolved around a tremendous, messy, moral problem for a photographer who set out to document the pain of both others and hersa problem even a well versed and uncompromising critic of photography like Sontag herself could provide no satisfactory and abiding answer to1 (Sontag, Photography within the Humanities 62). This thesis begins in response to but departs from these entangled discontents and controversies concerning the sensitive photographs of Sontag in A Photographers Life, with the hope to come back again to these rhetorical interrogations and try to formulate some answers. Chapter one examines how Leibovitzs A Photographers Life: 19902005 borrows the form and rhetoric of traditional family albumthe quintessential space for the construction and solidification of familial relations (Bourdieu; Hirsch)in order to memorialize, construct, and legitimize the photographers family-like relationship with her recently departed partner, Susan Sontag. It also discusses how the intertextuality of Leibovitzs professional studio works and private snapshots endows legibility to a love story discoverable only in the interstices between pictures. In borrowing from the genre of the family album, A Photographers Life relies on and thus inevitably reiterates the bigoted ideology of what a family is and ought to be. But concomitantly the same collection of photographs also clears a space for the hitherto marginalized members to emerge and secure a foothold within the xenophobic familial structure, allowing them to assert their public right to the loving relation with the deceaseda right sanctioned by works such as memorialization and mourning yet withheld from them almost in any other public sphere. Juxtaposing Leibovitzs strategy in A Photographers Life with that of the AIDS activists especially in NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, this chapter aims to explore how A Photographers Life articulates a politics of empowerment for the disenfranchised bereaved and how it instantiates the productive possibilities in the work of mourning. Having established the reading of A Photographers Life as a space for Leibovitz to struggle to not only come to terms with bereavement but also claim the right to mourn in the first chapter, chapter two turns to discuss Leibovitzs depiction of Sontags death in the tradition of 19th century postmortem photography, or memento mori (Ruby; Meinwald). It explores how Leibovitz felt compelled to follow the established ritual which aims at
1

During the Vietnam War, Richard Avedon had gone to Saigon of his own accord and photographed the victims of American bombing. Years later, a major magazine asked for his permission to publish those photographs of the horribly mutilated Vietnamese combatants and civilians. He did not know whether he should or should not make the photographs public and called up Sontag for her advice. Sontag admitted that she was also baffled by this question, for she could think of very good arguments both for doing and not doing it (62). For a full account of the anecdote, see Sontags Photography within the Humanities 62-63.

Lin 4 perpetuating the memory of a lost belovedhence the series of photographs observing in great detail of the deceased Sontag lying in the funeral home, which she took in a mesmerized state (Leibovitz, Introduction)as well as how she diverted from and in a sense deconstructed that genre, by evidence of her editorial decisions such as showing the contact sheet first and the stitched, retouched final photograph second. The only other photograph that shows traces of editing is the World Trade Center site a few days after 911. While technology now could easily allow Leibovitz to create a panoramic photograph of Ground Zero or Sontags body (the room where she lay was very spacious) without giving her viewing/photographing/editing process away, she curiously went out of her way to make sure that we see the frames, seams and other traces of manipulation in the final image of Sontags death and Ground Zero. It seems likely that she meant to take the realism of photography to task and to call attention to its essential flat-ness, in the way similar to Abstract Impressionisms questioning of Realism by making its medium, the canvas, visible. By analogy, the death in the two photographs is asymbolic, not susceptible to any narrative dialectic, and without depth, for it is represented only in [l]ayers of surface, to borrow Barthess words (Mourning Diary2). As a contrast, the death in Leibovitzs other photographsincluding her fathers funeral, a dying soldier and a boy killed by a bomb in Sarajevo, and bloodstained walls in Rwandais a symbolic presence, portrayed in the past tense, as an event that mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes, (Barthes, Mourning Diary) awaiting to be unpacked and narrated. This chapter attempts to point out Leibovitzs reluctance to turn the most traumatic two deaths into a metaphor and to underscore her effort in endowing photographic representation with its verbal counterparts ability for self-consciousness and for critically reflect on relationship between the photographer and the photographed. Finally, chapter three undertakes to bring the concepts of the intimate public (Berlant) and postmemory (Hirsch) into the discussion of the global readership of Leibovitz and Sontags intimate photographs, with the aim to sidestep the formulaic criticisms founded upon the private/public, personal/collective, home/remote, direct/inherited experience, exhibitionist/voyeur dichotomy. It will try to show how in the contemporary image-world (Sontag, On Photography) the images of celebrities are always already constituents of the global viewers family album or memory museum (Sontag, Regarding the Torture of Others) and how these heterogeneous spectators have created an intimate public through being privy to celebrities affairs, monumental or not. In this affected public world, the spectators can no longer treat the most private pictures of Sontag as tame spectacles yielding studium to satisfy their curiosity. Instead, their emotional attachment with Sontag as
2

I am still waiting for my hard copy of Mourning Diary. The quotations were taken from my Kindle edition of the text, so there are no page numbers for my reference.

Lin 5 the photographic subject opens up the temporal dimension in her still photographs, allows the punctum-as-time to disturb and madden their viewing, and liberates the photographic referent from the immutability of an icon (Barthes, Camera Lucida). By arguing that spectators enter into a civic contract (Azoulay) in the intimate public of photography, the final chapter speculates the possibility of an optimistic tele-intimacy that will complement and complicate Sontags conception of an unearned, illusory familiarity with distant people and happenings which is forged and mediated by televised images (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others).

Lin 6 Working Bibliography Aletti, Vince. What Would Susan Think? Mod Painters. Dec. 2006 Jan. 2007: 60-62. Wilson Web. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli. New York: Zone, 2008. Print. Baer, Ulrich. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. Print. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1981. Print. ---. Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977-September 15, 1979. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 2010. Print. Batchen, Geoffrey. Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero. Photogarphy Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthess Camera Lucida. Ed. Geoffrey Batchen. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009. 3-30. Print. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Trans. Edmund Jephocott, et al. Ed. Michael Jennings, et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 2008. Print. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print. Bernstein, Mary, and Renate Reimann, eds. Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Print. Ching, Barbara, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, eds. The Scandal of Susan Sontag. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Print. Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. Print. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Ellenbogen, Josh. On Photographic Elegy. The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Ed. Karen Weisman. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. 681-99. Print.

Lin 7 Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. SE. 243-58. Reprinted in. On Freuds Mourning and Melancholia. Ed. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, et al. London: IPA, 2007. 19-34. Print. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. ---, ed. The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH : Dartmouth, 1999. Print. Hughes, Alex, and Andrea Noble, eds. Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2003. Print. Jones, Cleve. Stitching A Revolution: The Making Of An Activist. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000. Print. Kennedy, David. Elegy. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Leibovitz, Annie. A Photographers Life: 1990-2005. New York: Random, 2006. Print. ---. Annie Leibovitz at Work. Ed. Sharon DeLano. New York: Random, 2008. Print. Leibovitz, Annie, and Susan Sontag. Women. New York: Random, 1999. Print. Lopate, Phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Print. McGuigan, Cathleen and Jac Chebatoris. Through Her Lens. Newsweek. 148.14 (2 Oct. 2006): 44-52, 54, 56, 58-62. EBESCO. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intellectual Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Print. Meinwald, Dan. Memento Mori: Death and Photography in Nineteenth Century America. Terminals. UCLA, n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Nunez, Sigrid. Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. New York: Atlas, 2011. Print. Poague, Leland. Conversations with Susan Sontag. Mississippi: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Print. Pridmore-Brown, Michele. Annie Leibovitzs Queer Consumption of Motherhood. Womens Studies Quarterly 37.3- 4 (2009): 81-95. Project MUSE. Web. 15 Dec. 2010. Rieff, David. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Sons Memoir. New York: Simon, 2008. Print. Rollyson, Carl and Lisa Paddock. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. New York: Norton, 2000. Print. Rollyson, Carl. Whats in a Word? Advocate. 21 Nov. 2006: 60-61. Wilson Web. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P,

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