"A Photographer's Life" at the Brooklyn Museum

Much has been made of the exhibition of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs at the Brooklyn Museum—and rightly so. After all, the retrospective exhibit juxtaposes public and private images from 1990–2005, so a photograph of Jamie Foxx cupping his crotch is hung (no pun intended) catty-corner to one of Susan Sontag’s corpse. Most of the public images—all of celebrities and politicians—have already become iconographic, including several first seen in “Vanity Fair.” The private shots detail intimate family scenes: images of Leibovitz’s kids and parents, snapshots of Sontag at the beach or getting chemo. The consensus seems to be that Sontag would have hated the way Leibovitz put Sontag’s most private moments on show, and that the snapshots aren’t nearly of the same caliber as the commercial work. (Plus, there’s an argument to be made here about how Leibovitz co-opted Sontag’s illness to use as a metaphor / artistic object vs. how Sontag did so herself way back when she published “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978.)

In her notes to the book that accompanies the show, Leibovitz explains that she liked the juxtaposition of public and private, because it felt like life to have disparate images on a single page (or, as in the museum, wall). That she was privy to Sontag’s last moments was her privilege as Sontag’s long-term partner, and that she photographed them was certainly her prerogative. I didn’t want to look at those shots of Sontag, but they were there and I did. I just wish we could have had some type of respectful separation between the personal and the public.

But we were in for an unexpected treat—well, two actually: mixed-media work by Rob Mueck and paintings by Walton Ford elsewhere in the museum. Mueck does ultra-realistic sculptures of people (the curators compared him to Rodin). His work literally fills the space: a cowering, anatomically accurate naked man measures 80 x 47 1/2 x 80 1/2 in. (see below).


A sculpture of a just-born baby hangs like Jesus crucified on the wall, while a huge woman—his mother perhaps?—lies in a 21-foot-long bed and stares out the door. At first glance, his sculptures horrify—they’re just so large—but, upon further examination, they’re strangely calming. The closer we get to the giants, the easier it is to see that they’re only us, bigger.

Ford’s show, “Tigers of Wrath,” features watercolors of animals done in the style of Audubon (Ford even writes on his paintings in pencil). But what looks pretty and silly at first glance, like something out of a children’s book, gets more disturbing in the second. Flies swirl around a tiger’s tail (see top photo), a crocodile gets ready to eat a monkey, a volcano erupts as a monkey in a toga dies. These are scenes of violence about to happen or happening. Unlike Mueck’s work, Ford’s work gets scarier and eerier the longer we look.