Photography Collection

There is no escaping the ubiquitous draw of celebrity portraiture. From magazine covers to billboards, consumers are besieged with famous faces making kamikaze runs for your hard-earned, increasingly diminishing dollars. So, it comes as no surprise to see more photographers who excel at this form of portraiture that is part conceptual gambit and part advertising tool repackaging their images as coffee-table volumes. The latest wave includes a new book by Rolling Stone magazine's chief photographer from 1992 to 2002, Mark Seliger, “The Music Book” (TeNeues, 160 pages, $75), and another from his predecessor, Annie Leibovitz's aptly titled “Annie Leibovitz at Work” (Random House, 240 pages, $40). There's no question that Seliger's mostly color images are instantly seductive and technically flawless. But context is everything. The Texas-born photographer's portraits, like that of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the buff or Fleetwood Mac in wedding drag, were conceived to sell magazines with an instant sales pitch aimed at the eyes.
This is precisely the main problem with the pictures and the book: The works are too carefully composed, too wary to let chance enter into the frame or allow happy accidents to intervene in the process. Occasionally, images like Seliger's poignant black-and-white portraits of the late Johnny Cash and Kurt Cobain hint at the guarded vulnerability beneath the public personas of these often-photographed singer-songwriters. Leibovitz is far more versatile when it comes to shaping celebrity portraits and she has a far more inventive spirit. And she shares some of her techniques in “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” which is part autobiography and part journal. The book's text is based on conversations with editor Sharon DeLano. Leibovitz's tone, while casual and often off-the-cuff, is that of a straight-shooter, talking about what it takes to craft savvy images like her iconic 1991 Vanity Fair cover of a pregnant Demi Moore, as well as her legion of portraits for Rolling Stone during the magazine's heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s. Budding photographers can take heart in Leibovitz's chronicle of triumphs and mistakes. The Connecticut-born photographer's story is one of experience forged from a tough-skinned insistence on persevering through decades of assignments that yielded striking images, like her 1978 picture of punk avatar Patti Smith or her moving 1980 portrait of a nude John Lennon embracing his wife Yoko Ono, hours before he was killed outside of New York's Dakota apartment building.
Speaking of Smith, the punk-rock pioneer is an accomplished visual artist in her own right and her ghostly black-and-white photographs get the VIP treatment in “Patti Smith: Land 250” (Thames & Hudson, 300 pages, $75). Juxtaposing short bursts of Smith's prose with haunting photographs, the book offers a curious mixture of hand-scrawled English and French text. But the work's real draw remains the silky, dream-like textures found in select photographs taken during Smith's many travels. Portraits of friends and such ordinary objects as a pair of weather-beaten boots or a snowman are endowed with an almost spectral presence. The eye soaks in these Polaroid images of a life dedicated to the pursuit of art as lovely artifacts of a lyrical vision on the run. Likewise, a true sense of inner visions, manifested as photographic images, radiates from master photographers Mary Ellen Mark, in “Seen Behind the Scene: Forty Years of Photographing on Set” (Phaidon, 264 pages, $59.95), and the late Manuel Alvarez Bravo, with “Photopoetry” (Chronicle Books, 320 pages, $75). These photographers eclipse most, in terms of their shared willingness to be open to spontaneity and receptive to working without a safety net. Both Mark and Alvarez Bravo have created portraits of fellow artists here, but their imagery transcends the genre, making unspoken statements built on extended conversations and on visual riffs that emerge from an intimacy shared between photographers and their subjects. There are Mark's numerous intense portraits of Marlon Brando, on location during Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 epic film “Apocalypse Now.” At other moments, Mark is practically invisible behind her camera's viewfinder, finding just the right angle or shifts of light to reveal the focused intensity and play evoked by such dearly departed giants of the cinema as Federico Fellini, while making 1969's “Satyricon,” or Luis Bunuel, calmly crafting surrealist traps with 1970's “Tristana.”
Alvarez Bravo's kindred spirits, the famous husband-and-wife artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, appear as if they are locking gazes with the unseen photographer. But beneath the elegant arrangements of people and objects immortalized in the famed Mexican photographer's images is a droll, surrealist wit reveling in sexually charged tableaux (1938's “Good Reputation Sleeping”) and the everyday sights, suddenly elevated into haunting arias of odd juxtapositions (1928-29's “Wooden Horse”). Like any book of great photography, “Photopoetry” lives up to its playful title, thus inviting repeat viewings from even the most jaded aficionado of the photography book. Graced with a subtle mastery and appetite to see beyond the surface, Alvarez Bravo's photographs do all of the talking, lodging themselves in your memory the way that only masterly photographs can.

Neil Kendricks, a San Diego artist and writer, is the film curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.