Last week my friend and I went to see the Anne Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and boy was it a disappointment. After paying the full £11 in entrance fee (I forgot to bring my student pass) you'd expect to see a bigger exhibition with a more exciting selection of photos. On top of it, the layout which resembled a maze created quite a big confusion as the pictures were divided into different rooms, without any obvious explanation.
The exhibition featured over 150 photos; a mixture of intimate family and friends photos including her partner, the late Susan Sontag as well as portraits of celebrities and public figures such as George W. Bush, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman and the infamous portrait of a naked pregnant Demi Moore. Many of the pictures are recognizable, having been printed in a variety of glossy magazines but the exhibition also showed the private life of Leibovitz: the birth of her three daughters, family holidays with her parents and various stages of Sontag's illness which she carefully documented.
Walking out of the gallery it was Leibovitz's private photographs of Sontag decaying that haunted me the most. When I got home I went to The Guardian's website to read the review and I couldn't have agreed more with David Rieff, son of Sontag: "in his own memoir of his mother, stresses how hard he had to work to maintain Sontag's illusion - what he calls "positive denial" - that death might still be avoided. "It was life and not truth that she was desperate for," he wrote in his book published earlier this year. And in one bitter paragraph he describes his mother as being "humiliated posthumously ... in those carnival images of death taken by Leibovitz"".
T.L.
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