A Frame In Time - Annie Leibovitz at the National Portrait Gallery

Whether she likes it or not, Annie Lei­bovitz is very much a celebri­ty. A celebri­ty’s celebri­ty in fact – the rich, fa­mous and pow­er­ful queue up to be pho­tographed by her, and her more per­son­al pro­jects are sim­ply cher­ry-​picked, safe in the knowl­edge that any­one she wants to shoot will be more than oblig­ing. Since her work on a fledgling Rolling Stone, Lei­bovitz has been pre­sent at the growth of the mod­ern celebri­ty as a com­mod­i­ty, grow­ing with­in that cli­mate to be­come a part of the en­vi­ron­ment, grant­ed un­par­al­leled ac­cess and free­dom in her work.



A Pho­tog­ra­pher’s Life at the Na­tion­al Por­trait Gallery charts her work, for the most part, from the early nineties through to the pre­sent day, a dis­ap­point­ment for those who may have jus­ti­fi­ably want­ed to see the pho­tog­ra­pher’s ear­li­er work. How­ev­er, rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle is made of the mas­sive scale com­mer­cial and ad­ver­tis­ing work she has be­come fa­mous for, in­stead stick­ing to more per­son­al por­traits, such as those taken for Van­i­ty Fair and var­i­ous small­er scale com­mis­sions. There are a fair few stan­dard stu­dio por­traits among these, which is some­what of a dis­ap­point­ment for those fa­mil­iar with the vi­su­al flair usu­al­ly demon­strat­ed. By her own ad­mis­sion, Lei­bovitz is far from a great stu­dio pho­tog­ra­pher – the light­ing is well done, but un­o­rig­i­nal, and the stu­dio lim­its her ge­nius for on-​lo­ca­tion com­po­si­tion, but those who have come for the fa­mous faces rather than the qual­i­ty of the im­ages will be suit­ably im­pressed by the pletho­ra of names and faces on dis­play.



But mov­ing be­yond these im­ages re­veals a Lei­bovitz that is as as orig­i­nal and ex­cit­ing as she ever was in the drug and al­co­hol fu­elled early days of Rolling Stone. The shots of mul­ti­ple peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar are a tour-​de-​force of every way a pho­to­graph can re­veal the re­la­tion­ships be­tween peo­ple - John­ny Depp, dressed in dark cloth­ing, lies be­tween the legs of a naked Kate Moss on rum­pled sheets in a mo­ment of per­fect in­ti­ma­cy. Patti Smith shares a del­i­cate, but melan­choly mo­ment with her chil­dren. Even a photo of the late pho­tog­ra­pher Richard Ave­don with his own com­pan­ion – a 10x8 field cam­era - is lov­ing­ly craft­ed in every way to bring out the con­nec­tion he shared with his great­est tool.



How­ev­er, the great­est mo­ments in this ex­hi­bi­tion are the per­son­al por­traits that dot the walls. Often not big­ger than 6x4 inch­es, they seemed to be large­ly ig­nored by the celebri­ty hunt­ing mass­es in the gallery – who grav­i­tat­ed to­ward the 20x16 (and larg­er) im­ages of stars. It seems easy to for­give a vis­i­tor for miss­ing a tiny black and white print when it is placed be­side an in­finite­ly en­thralling shot of Nic­hole Kid­man, but these shots are the mas­sive­ly im­por­tant (and un­seen, up to this point) snaps of fam­i­ly and friends, and com­prise ev­ery­thing from a grin­ning por­trait of her dad and broth­er to the final mo­ments of her dad’s and com­pan­ion Susan Son­tag’s life. While being small, they are just as re­veal­ing of the real Annie Lei­bovitz, and prove that re­gard­less of her sta­tus as per­haps the top por­trait pho­tog­ra­pher of our time, she never lost the eye for in­ti­ma­cy and re­la­tion­ships that marked her as great from the early days of her ca­reer. Fur­ther­more, they offer a great and com­pelling in­sight into the pho­tog­ra­pher’s pri­vate life and not just her pub­li­cised work, al­low­ing those who had be­come jaded with the over-​elab­o­rate com­mer­cial im­ages that de­fined her pub­lic image in the last ten years a sigh of re­lief in the knowl­edge that she has not been over­tak­en by them.