Of Greatness and Grief

Annie Leibovitz, Capturing the Sheen of Celebrity and the Grit of Loss

In this business, anyone assigned a famous-person story (like the one you are reading) would want Annie Leibovitz to take the pictures that will run with it to sell it to your eye. Not because she's lots of laughs, or easy to work with, or suave, which she isn't, but because she's tops.

At making popular public portraits, nobody is better. Half, but only half, of "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art proves she's the best we've got.

Its other half is thick with loss. Her show is cracked in two.

She's had other exhibitions here. No doubt she'll have more. Maybe that's because her insistently approving portraits of the famous have the sheen of public monuments (of which Washington has many) and maybe it's because they ladle out big helpings of high-fashion celebrity (of which we don't have much). Also the photographer is a local girl made good. Leibovitz (her name ends "vitz," not "witz") grew up as an Air Force brat in suburban Silver Spring. Think how far she's come. First she went out West to study painting in San Francisco. Then, in 1970, she started shooting rock-and-rollers for the pages of Rolling Stone. Now, at 58, she's got a place in American art.

The painter Gilbert Stuart, who worked downtown and put his presidents on the currency, and the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who put his on Mount Rushmore, are among her predecessors. So are the Hollywood directors who lit Marilyn and Liz, and so is Andy Warhol, who brought their stardom into art. They, too, made popular public portraits. But theirs were for then, hers are for now.

Uma Thurman, Cindy Crawford, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore. When Leibovitz shoots glamorously beautiful women they look more glamorously beautiful than they ever have. Likewise for the glamorously beautiful men. At the Corcoran, Brad Pitt is a bed animal in leopard-print pants and Leonardo DiCaprio is a Mediterranean demigod with a bird around his neck, Leo and the Swan).

Leibovitz's Queen Elizabeth II couldn't be more regal. Leibovitz's Johnny Cash (she shot the singer's family picking guitars on the porch) couldn't be more country. Her Mikhail Baryshnikov seems to float above the sea, a paragon of grace.

Once upon a time, lots of painters painted demigods, though not many do so now. The shining figures whom she photographs seem more than mortal, too. They have magic. They distill our dreams. She distills the distillation.

Her art -- which draws in equal measure from 8-by-10 Hollywood glossies, chic fashion photography, Jimmy Olsen news shots, Life magazine photo essays, Leni Riefenstahl heroics and Karsh-of-Ottawa close-ups -- is as attentive to art history as it is to power. Technically, graphically and commercially as well, it's pretty near impeccable. And it isn't snarky. Monuments don't belittle. She doesn't tear down, she builds up.

Skillful Richard Avedon was, comparatively, a sadist. When he wasn't shooting fashion, he liked to tear the psychic skin from the faces of his subjects. When he sat for Annie Leibovitz he was 79, and sickly, and understandably afraid.

"Don't worry," she said.

Some find her work too glib. Some gripe it smells of cash. And I know high-toned art folk who -- appalled by the vulgarity of blatantly consumerist hype-ridden celebrity -- wrinkle up their noses in the presence of her art. I don't, I tend to marvel. Her superiority, it seems to me, is pretty undeniable, like that of Tiger Woods. Their quarrel is not with Leibovitz, their quarrel is with the world.