Tear the Prison Down
Annie Leibovitz's new exhibit gestures at liberal feminism's conflicts with race and class without really confronting them.
Annie Leibovitz’s new photo exhibition, “Women: New Portraits,” which traveled through New York last month, is both forceful and fraught. Her attention to the interiority of her subjects, juxtaposed with the show’s agitprop staging, urges viewers to question who “women” are and on what basis can they be considered a collective force. Yet the show’s premise also implies that Leibovitz has somehow represented “women” — a claim that veers perilously close to a fashion magazine spread, blithely bypassing all other political, social, and personal realities. Leibovitz’s exhibition, then, is as compelling, urgent, and unfinished as the history of feminism itself.
A “Radical” Idea
“Women” returns to a project that Leibovitz undertook in collaboration with her late partner Susan Sontag, published and exhibited widely in 1999. In some respects, the exhibit is a traditional portrait series drawing on Leibovitz’s long career as a celebrity photographer; the subjects are disproportionately famous women.
Yet many of the women pictured are also diverse and outspoken — activists, writers, artists, models, businesswomen, and politicians like Kara Walker, Amy Schumer, Misty Copeland, Caitlyn Jenner, Wendi Deng Murdoch, Elizabeth Warren, Patti Smith, Lupita Nyong’o, Michelle Obama, and Laura Poitras. Most are American, and most have a public voice, though Leibovitz has included several global women’s advocates like Malala Yousafzai and Aung San Suu Kyi, in a gesture toward geographical comprehensiveness.
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