A photographic imagination

From the NY Times review

Exquisite printing aside, the family images are professional but pedestrian. The best are, not surprisingly, portraits that bestow an aura of quasi-celebrity, especially one of her mother looking sage, lively and handsomely androgynous.

In the show’s introductory wall text, Ms. Leibovitz is quoted as saying: “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” But saying it doesn’t make it so.

Leaking vanity and ambition, at once yearning for greatness and blithely assuming that greatness has been achieved, the works on view are like a high-brow, static form of reality television. It is fueled by an obsession with celebrity and accented with the trappings of first-class travel, serious real estate and privilege. Its revelations are mostly inadvertent.

Ms. Leibovitz’s images are best at magazine scale, and here you can skim across them, like turning pages.

The show’s low point comes at the end, with a gallery devoted to eight ridiculously large and blurry black-and-white landscape photographs ... but mainly these photographs read as a frantic plea: “Take me seriously as an artist!”