Never Never Land

Annie Leibovitz for Condé Nast, 2007–8.

A bewildering essay on Annie Leibovitz by Choire Sicha for the New York Observer. He says that in the 80s, editors at Rolling Stone, clutching stats in hand, pushed out design and photo talent in favor of covers that polled well with consumers and moved newsstand sales. "Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz," writes Sicha.

Then comes the more provocative thesis that as Leibovitz continued shooting the same people she was unable to strike gold twice. "There is Mikhail Baryshnikov on the beach in 1990—and then, in 2006, he is rappelling down or up a building, looking nothing so much like a Bruce Willis stand-in. And then again also as an incredibly old Peter Pan in one of the latest Disney campaigns."

But neither idea pairs with Sicha's stated thesis: that "An artist who was once fascinated with her subjects lately seems largely fascinated with herself." Granted, that's a dek line and editors write those, not writers. Nevertheless, the thesis is either that something changed about Leibovitz's work or something changed Leibovitz's work and by the end of the piece it isn't clear which Sicha believes.

In fact, I think there's no problem if you just refuse to take Leibovitz at her word when she says she was never a journalist. In fact, she was and still is. At one point her editors asked her to live among her subjects and produce provocative photographs getting to the bottom of them, whatever she thought that entailed, and that's what she did, reliably and at a fast clip. Now people ask her to lend her brand name to their pursuits, whether that's a Disney campaign or an editorial spread, and it doesn't matter whatsoever to anyone what she produces so long as her name's on the project and a beautiful face is in the frame. There's no overarching structural factor behind her professional decline unless you want to call Tina Brown an overarching structural factor, and I don't. It's really very simple: Annie Leibovitz used to be a great journalist, but now she's a hack.