Aiming to Impress

So, this week's assignment is to compare and contrast two photographers that at first glance may seem to have very little in common - Annie Leibovitz and James Nachtwey.

Annie Leibovitz is considered by some the most famous celebrity photographer in America, perhaps the world, and it is difficult to argue with that when she was the one chosen to shoot the Obama family portrait last fall, as well as the Queen of Britain in 2007, not to mention every celebrity known to (Western) man and woman. As we could see in the PBS documentary about her, Annie Liebovitz: Life through a Lens, she is well-known for her work for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair and foremost for her many "iconic" - that word appears all the time when you read about her - portraits of various celebrities. She often uses elaborate sets or clothes or ploy ideas for her arranged pieces, although those are not the only types of pictures she takes, and I am in no way doing justice to her here. She is considered to be a great portrait photographer and there's no denying that her photos have had a huge impact on popular culture in the Western world. She's been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress, for chrissake!


(Nicole Kidman. Picture borrowed from www.pbs.org, 2010-03-15)


(Martina Navratilova. Picture borrowed from www.pbs.org, 2010-03-23)

James Nachtwey takes photographs of a radically different kind. He is by some considered the greatest war photographer around, moving from one crisis to another with his camera. He has won a number of awards for his work, including Magazine Photographer of the Year in the US a number of times. The documentary we watched about him, War Photographer, begins with a quote by legendary war photographer Robert Capa that clearly is meant to sum up Nachtwey's attitude: "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."


(West Bank 2000, Palestinians fighting the Israeli Army. Picture borrowed from www.jamesnachtwey.com, 2010-03-15)

Yet, after viewing many of Nachtwey's pictures, it appears to me that there is a strong aesthetic side to them as well. In many cases, they are beautiful pictures in themselves, even though the subject matter is painful and violent. Just look at the colors in the West Bank picture above - the scarf and the flames against the smoky blue sky, the dirt and the white wall, the shadows stretching long and the young man's matching clothes. Leibovitz could not have posed it more strikingly however hard she tried, with her set designers and camera loaders.

Or see the picture below and compare it to the picture of Nicole Kidman. Isn't there a certain kinship between them, a shared eye perhaps?


(Afghanistan, 1996. Mourning a brother killed by a Taliban rocket. Picture borrowed from www.jamesnachtwey.com, 2010-03-15)

Perhaps, as a photographer, you can't help watching the world in picture frames? Perhaps you cannot stop looking for the beautiful shot even if, like James Nachtwey, you are working in the midst of chaos and misery?

This, for me, doesn't lessen the effect of Nachtwey's pictures, I much prefer them to Liebovitz', probably because there to me is something real behind them. I think Annie Leibovitz sums it up very well herself in Life through a Lens, when talking about her short stint as a war photographer in Sarajevo:

"After that, what side Barbra Streisand needed to be photographed from didn't seem so important."