Adams & Leibovitz @ Corcoran

I used my long Fall holiday weekend (aka “Thanksgiving”) to check out the Annie Leibovitz and Ansel Adams exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. An interesting outing, indeed.

It’s been quite a long time since I was last at the Corcoran, but that previous outing was also to see Annie Leibovitz, more specifically her then current exhibit, “Women.” “Women” was a FABULOUS show. I loved the concept behind the photos, and to see the large scale of the exhibit photos was stunning.

This current Leibovitz exhibit, “A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005,” included some photos from “Women,” but reached far beyond it, too. The museum pamphlet says of the exhibit:

“[it] includes more than 200 photographs by the celebrated photographer, encompassing well-known portraits made on editorial assignment as well as personal photographs of her family and close friends. “I don’t have two lives,” Leibovitz says, “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”

Conceptually, I think it’s an interesting project; I like the way in which Leibovitz asserts her whole self through the merging of her photos. It’s a project that thrusts into the foreground (literally) her relationship with Susan Sontag, potentially surprising those unfamiliar with Leibovitz’s personal life. Photographs of other family members also strongly figure in this project. I was particularly charmed by photos of her children (to whom I was amazed to learn Leibovitz birthed while in her 50s!), and of one specific photo of Queen Elizabeth.

On the whole, however, while I am certainly glad that I went to the exhibit, I didn’t find that it touched me in the same way that “Women” had. Many of the professional photographs were ones I had seen before in various publications, and hence weren’t as exciting as they might have been to novel viewers. Or else, the subjects of the photographs weren’t ones I particularly cared about, and so I didn’t feel an emotional connection to them. There was one photograph, however, of Leonardo DiCaprio holding a swan whose neck was draped around DiCaprio’s neck that was quite evocative. Many of the personal photographs were small in scale (that is, they were more or less the size of “normal” photos), and for some reason instead of drawing me closer (literally and figuratively) this served to make me feel more distant from the subject, and hence from the exhibit as a whole since it was a look into Leibovitz’s life. Ironically, the black and white landscape photographs which were huge in scale didn’t offer me a point of connection, and failed to pull me in, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d still recommend that others go to the exhibit before it closes on January 13.

After spending over an hour in the Leibovitz exhibit, I headed over to the neighboring exhibit, “Ansel Adams.”

I had encountered Adams’ work before, primarily in photography books, calendars, and of course, in wall posters. Never before, though, had I ever seen any of his work in person. My friend commented that after having visited the Leibovitz exhibit, Adams’ work seemed to pale in comparison. I wasn’t surprised to find that the number of people in the Adams’ exhibit was no where near as large as those in the Leibovitz exhibit. It’s true, it’s quite a different experience to see Adams’ photographs in person than as a wall poster. For one, the photographs themselves are noticeably smaller than the posters. Their size seemed in keeping with the time at which they were done, however, and so I didn’t experience them as “small” in the same way my friend did.

In addition, Adams’ exhibit gave a sense of his work over his six-decade career, which I really appreciated. That’s four times as long as the Leibovitz exhibit showcased, in roughly half as many photographs—talk about how the curator's staging of an exhibit affects the viewers’ responses! I hope more people will take sufficient time to see Adams’ exhibit, too, before it closes on January 27.

Truth be told, however, I enjoyed Adams’ exhibit just as much (if not more so) than the one of Leibovitz’s work because I felt so connected to his photographs. I’ve seen Half Dome with my own eyes, and that made me appreciate his photos of it that much more. Viewing his photos let me re-live my own experiences of my trip to Yosemite. The same is true of his photos of the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s been such a long time (a year and a half) since last I went “home” to Daly City, CA, and so when I saw his photos of the Sutro baths, of the Golden Gate Bridge, and of housing developments in the San Bruno hills, it made me nostalgic and homesick.

There are many different reasons that I appreciate the art that I do. On this day, however, I was won over by the emotional reactions that Adams’ photography elicited from me and touched my heart.

Oh, the power of “home.”