Annie Leibovitz has taken some of the most famous images of our time, and her name is still a byword for prestige photography, both glam and artistically credible. As the longtime partner of Susan Sontag, she occupied the rareified echelon of "respectable supercouple." As the in-depth story by New York magazine's Andrew Goldman tells it, she was generally thought to pull down astronomical fees for Vanity Fair and Vogue and be well-set with royalties, to say nothing of her successes in NYC real estate. In short, in a lot of ways she seemed like a definition of modern success.

It's always confusing when people who are really rich - or could be - go bankrupt. How do they manage it? We think. Sure, it's well known that Leibovitz struggled with addiction for years - being Rolling Stone's head photographer in its heyday couldn't have helped - and she's also a notorious perfectionist, whose shoots are legendarily expensive. But still, she wasn't someone purely at the mercy of the market's vagaries, but someone talented, and with her drug habit licked and what seemed like a stable family life, this level of excess just feels...confusing. Well, as the article details, she was just a bad businesswoman: extravagant, imprudent, generous, stubborn, alternately greedy and unworldly, and bad about getting maximum money from her achievements. She was also one of many who lived on credit and didn't expect it all to come crashing down. Says Goldman,

It's impossible to account for all of Leibovitz's line-item expenses, but as surprising as it may be to outsiders, she was clearly spending beyond her means. One close associate of Leibovitz's theorizes that she identified too much with her subjects. "Photographers aren't professional athletes, recording artists, or supermodels," the source says. "Compared to 99 percent of the world, she makes a vast fortune. The problem occurs when a person becomes so famous that they start feeling that they're more in line financially with Oprah or Madonna."

Um, okay, but to the rest of us, that hardly cuts it. She still had much, much more money than even the average celebrity photographer. And $24 million in debt is hard to rack up. So there's the usual incredulity that accompanies these stories of excess. But in this case, maybe there's more: there's a disappointment that's actually quite unfair and has nothing to do with Annie Leibovitz the actual person. I would never have realized it before all this, but Leibovitz was someone whose life I sort of looked up to. Not just for the work, but because, if I'd stopped to analyze it, she seemed to have it figured out. Even in the tragic aftermath of losing her partner, she seemed like a definition of true success, someone who seemed to have the magic combo of artistic and financial symbiosis. And I'm sure, in some way, her sex and her sexuality played into this: she was someone who'd earned the right to live as she wanted, and as such she was an inspiration and a pioneer. That's unfair of course, as all such un-asked-for pressures are: Leibovitz was, I guess, allowed to be as bad with money and extravagant and cut off from normal concerns as any rich person. I know this, and yet I feel an extra disappointment: another one bites the dust. Another person whom we didn't know, but whom we decided to project onto as a sign that it could be done, is fallible in the same way so many people are. And money's no security from anything.

How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz? [New York]

Leibovitz is a famed photographer who shoots for titles like Vogue and Vanity Fair — her staff contract with the latter is rumored to net her a cool $2 million per year — and does commercial freelance work for corporations like Disney and luxury behemoths like Louis Vuitton.

Her financial difficulties are not news; Leibovitz first approached Art Capital for a $5 million loan last fall, and borrowed another $10.5 million in December. Art Capital typically charges 6-16% interest; a $5 million principal carried at 6% compound interest for two months, plus an additional $10.5 million loan, also at 6% interest, compounded through this month, would equal just over $24 million, which is in fact the sum that Art Capital filed suit for Wednesday in New York's supreme court.

As collateral, Leibovitz offered the titles to her three Greenwich Village townhouses, and her home in upstate New York — and the rights to her entire archive of work. But why would such a famous artist — and one of the most commercially successful photographers the world has ever known — need to pawn the rights to every photograph she has ever taken or will ever take until the loans are repaid?

Leibovitz was said by the Times to require the $15.5 million line of credit to pay off mortgages and unspecified "financial stresses." Those stresses would seem to include:

• A lawsuit, filed last year by photographic equipment supplier B2Pro, for $227,000 in alleged unpaid bills
• A $385,000 lawsuit filed against her by Nicoletta Santoro, the stylist who worked on one of Leibovitz's Disney campaigns
• Ongoing costs associated with the renovation of her Greenwich Village townhouses

When news of Leibovitz's financial difficulties first surfaced, there was speculation that the photographer was left cash-strapped when she inherited property from her longtime partner, Susan Sontag, in 2004; as an unmarried gay couple, Leibovitz would have been required to pay a steep 45% tax on any inheritance. But it turns out that Sontag and Leibovitz were no longer together by the time of Sontag's death; the essayist bequeathed the bulk of her estate to her son, David Rieff, and in her will left Leibovitz only a maximum of four "articles of my tangible personal property." So, issues of blatant unfairness in the federal inheritance laws aside, it wasn't the "gay tax" that cost Leibovitz millions.

A more likely culprit is the costly renovations to Leibovitz's two townhouses; in 2002, workers for the photographer damaged the foundations of a third, adjoining house, forcing the family who owned it to evacuate their home. (They eventually settled for an undisclosed sum with Leibovitz, after filing a $15 million lawsuit; the terms of the settlement included Leibovitz buying the crippled house.) At the time, neighborhood preservationists whispered that the photographer had intentionally undermined the foundations of the protected houses, which all date from the 1830s, in order to get the go-ahead to perform renovations that would otherwise have been considered too drastic by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, a strategy known as "demolition by neglect." Seven years later, the townhouses are finally repaired — but at who knows what cost.

Now, Art Capital Group is demanding Leibovitz allow real estate agents access to her Greenwich Village properties so they can assess them for sale; the lender's suit against Leibovitz accuses her of "boldly deceptive conduct" and the failure to make any attempt to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scheduled repayments. Although at the time she took out the loans, Leibovitz agreed to the idea of selling her physical and intellectual property in order to make repayments, since taking the money, Art Capital Group alleges, she has refused to comply with her creditor's attempts to take what she signed over.

It seems unlikely that a woman who last year couldn't come up with $400,000 to pay a freelance stylist, and $200,000 to pay for her photographic equipment, would be able to survive a $24 million judgment against her without being bankrupted. Even those triplet townhouses can't be worth much in Manhattan's present real estate market. If Leibovitz went into this agreement expecting leniency from a company which decorates its New York offices with the masterpieces forfeited by other defaulting debtors, she has been sadly proven wrong.

Earlier:
Is Annie Leibovitz Being Forced To Pay A Gay Tax?

Lender Sues Annie Leibovitz [CityRoom]
That Old Master? It's At The Pawn Shop [NYTimes]
Will Annie Leibovitz Be Forced Into Bankruptcy? [Gawker]
Follow-up: Part of One Annie Leibovitz Lawsuit Dismissed (Corrected) [PDNPulse]
Lawsuits Claim Leibovitz Owes $778K For Photo Services [PDNOnline]
Home Renovation Buried Annie Leibovitz In Debt [P6]
Anne Leibovitz Threatened With Bankruptcy [P6]

Ziff's film, Picture Me, premiered at the Gen Art film festival in New York on Monday — and after watching this trailer, I am dying to see it. Ziff's background — her parents are an NYU neurobiologist and a lawyer, and Ziff herself went to high school at Manhattan's tony Dalton school — made her an unusual fit in a profession that, as she explains, makes you feel like "a living doll." And, as she worked in the industry, she began to question its practices: from the probably harmful (in an interview with the Daily Beast, Ziff relates working with a model so young that she was playing with a coloring book) to the abstractly interesting (there's no better demonstration of the power dynamic of the photographer/model relationship than the footage, in the trailer, of Ziff turning her video camera on a backstage lensman who is shooting her). This is a girl who's clearly read her Sontag. (It must have been a struggle to find the time. A brief summary of her very successful career requires mention of everything from Chanel couture and Balenciaga shows, to Delias catalogs, and ads for DKNY and the Gap.)

In Picture Me, Ziff and her co-director, Ole Schell, get models like Diana Dondoe, Tanya Dziahileva, Olga Scherer, Lisa Cant, and Missy Rayder, as well as industry eminences grises like Gilles Bensimon, on tape discussing everything from models' weight (how heartbreaking it is to hear Rayder talking about how she always felt her hips made her stand out from the other girls in the runway lineup) to the realities of becoming the family breadwinner at the ripe old age of 14. (When Schell asks Dziahileva, who is from Belarus, to describe her family's situation prior to her modeling career, she shakes her head no, presumably from shame at her former poverty.) The full film promises to show models addressing topics like agency debt and our vulnerability to the predators who mar the industry. (Topics which are of course close to my heart.)

It helps to know that, for Ziff at least, this is a story with a happy ending. She earned enough money to buy a place of her own in the West Village, and now, at 26, she's studying English and Fine Arts at Columbia. (You can read her contributions to the university paper, the Spectator.)

It's great that a model thought to create the opportunity to talk back to an industry that sometimes leaves you feeling like a professional mute.

The Ugly Truth About Models [The Daily Beast]
Picture Me [Facebook]
Interview With Sara Ziff, Then Aged 19 [ZoneZero]

Goldstein cites a piece by After Ellen's Julia Miranda, which explains that most of Leibovitz's financial woes stem from inheriting the estate of her longtime partner, Susan Sontag. Writes Miranda:

Same-sex couples do not have the same privileges as straight married couples when it comes to inheritance. If your partner passes away and leaves her estate to you, you have to pay up to 50 percent of the value of your inheritance in taxes. However, if you and your partner were recognized as a married couple, you wouldn't have to pay a dime.

Sontag left several properties to Leibovitz, who was forced to pay half of their value in order to keep them. Hence, the gay tax. Goldstein has personal experience with this issue; she notes:

In my household it comes to around $329.25 monthly: that's the gay tax my wife and I shell out for me to be on her health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income. It doesn't matter that our Massachusetts marriage is recognized in New York. Companies pay for their employees' health insurance with pre-tax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn't federally recognized.

Is it a shame that Leibovitz is making headlines for spoofing her own photographs instead of for her struggle? Since she is so high-profile, so visible, couldn't she be a galvanizing voice in the fight for gay marriage? Or is this a case where the personal need not be political?

Annie Leibovitz And The Gay Tax [Salon]
Annie Leibovitz Is In A Jam [AfterEllen]

After such universally applicable advice as, "go off to college at 16 - if not at first to a prestigious academic institution, then transfer to one on scholarship. Become a research assistant to a dazzling young professor, and within ten days, get engaged, then marry him," Yoder offers seven specific tips for Sontag-style living, backed up by quotes from Sontag herself.

For instance, Yoder advices her readers to "live voraciously," and offers this Sontagian support: "A thought occurred to me today - so obvious, so always obvious! It was absurd to suddenly comprehend it for the first time - I felt rather giddy, a little hysterical: - There is nothing, nothing that stops me from doing anything except myself..."

Another tip:

Be confident, ambitious, and cultivate your ego: "Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity." And: "With a little ego-building - such as the fait accompli this journal provides - I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said."

You might think that with all this ego floating around your head, you might want to get outside yourself occasionally — perhaps through physical contact with another person. But for the Sontag-disciple, such contact is just a means to an end:

Make time for good sex: "The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not salvation, but, more, the birth of ego. Yet the only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself... To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound of my own name. To write, I must love my name. The writer is in love with himself..."

In a world where women are still supposed to be giving and nurturing, Sontag's self-absorption is kind of charming . . . but that's partly because she's Susan Sontag, and egotism is a lot more forgivable in a genius. Should wannabe intellectuals really be using her words as a guide? We know these tips are tongue-in-cheek, but we can't help thinking that anyone who modeled her life on them would turn out pretty annoying. And really, does anyone need tips on how to be an egomaniac? We know plenty of people who figured that one out on their own.

A Girl's Guide To Becoming An Intellectual: Susan Sontag's Journals [The Millions]

And then, in November, we got one of the most beautiful editorials of the year, inspired by the Ingmar Bergman film Persona. So, let’s take a paranoid seaside lesbian vacation, with Susan Sontag!

Steven Meisel has an extraordinary relationship with Italian Vogue. He’s shot every cover of every issue for as long as I can remember. Meisel particularly loves to “discover” new models — and among the girls he rocketed to acclaim via Italian Vogue are models like Karen Elson, Sasha Pivovarova, and Coco Rocha. His signature style is a little desaturated, a little obsessed with doubling, mirroring, and repetition, a little moody, and perhaps ever so slightly off; the scenes he creates are often filled with a vague dread, like a David Lynch movie.

What do I love about Italian Vogue? Covers like this. Toni Garrn, 17-year-old Calvin Klein favorite, and her 21-year-old German compatriot, Katrin Thormann, looking lovely and peachy and perhaps just a little awkward, as though they’ve been disturbed in some moment of intimacy. “A New Look At Seasonal Dressing.” (There’s a cover line we could never improve.) What does that even mean? Italian Vogue is confident you’re going to want to find out.

The editorial inside, called Cottage In Riva Al Mare (“Cottage by the sea”) is the kind of 34-page spread that would’ve been reduced to an incoherent 12-page hackjob under Anna Wintour’s watch at American Vogue. Each image is its own best reason for existence; there isn’t exactly anything as didactic as a plot going on here, but the general idea is that two women have gone away to the coast for something more purposeful than a vacation. They play dominoes, they read, they face off with arms crossed, they make love, they weep. Their queasy friendship — if it is a friendship? — doesn’t seem likely to survive these intensities of feeling. The last image is of Katrin clutching her suitcase, her back to the ocean.

The obvious reference is to Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, which is more or less about an actress named Elizabeth, played by Liv Ullman, who becomes an elective mute following a sort of psychic break during a performance of Electra. She goes to the seaside in the care of a psychiatric nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson), and, over the course of the film, some sort of exchange occurs. It’s as if Alma can’t help but fall into the void created by Elizabeth’s silence, and in her willingness to fill the space left by Elizabeth’s withdrawal, Alma loses something of herself.

Susan Sontag loved Persona; in her 1969 book Styles of Radical Will, she called it “Bergman’s masterpiece.” In examining the contemporary critics’ general distaste for the movie, she wrote:

To be sure, some of the paltriness of the critics’ reaction may be more a response to the signature that Persona carries than to the film itself. That signature has come to mean a prodigal, tirelessly productive career; a rather facile, often merely beautiful, by now (it seemed) almost oversize body of work; a lavishly inventive, sensual, yet melodramatic talent, employed with what appeared to be a certain complacency, and prone to embarrassing displays of intellectual bad taste.

The strange thing is, most of that’s also a familiar vein of criticism in regards to Meisel’s work — a withering level of productivity, “often merely beautiful,” melodramatic, complacent, empty-headed. In looking over this editorial, which because of the simplicity of its mise en scène probably is going to divide opinion, Sontag’s words about its most direct filmic inspiration came to mind in an entirely different context. So, here we go, because I thought it would be fun: Steven Meisel, annotated by Susan Sontag.

“Persona is constructed according to a form that resists being reduced to a story — say, the story about the relation (however ambiguous and abstract) between two women named Elizabeth and Alma, a patient and a nurse, a star and an ingénue, alma (soul) and persona (mask).”

“There might exist what could be called a dormant plot.”

“After we have seen Elizabeth enter Alma’s room and stand beside her and stroke her hair, we see Alma, pale, troubled, asking Elizabeth the next morning, ‘Did you come to my room last night?’ and Elizabeth, slightly quizzical, anxious, shakes her head no.”

“One tactic upheld by traditional narrative is to give ‘full’ information (by which I mean all that is needed, according to the standard of relevance set up in the ‘world’ proposed by the narrative), so that the ending of the viewing or reading experience coincides, ideally, with the full satisfaction of one’s desire to know, to understand what happened and why. (This is, of course, a highly manipulated quest for knowledge.)”

“There is, above all, the connection between the two women themselves, which, in its feverish proximity, its caresses, its sheer passionateness (avowed by Alma in word, gesture, and fantasy) could hardly fail, it would seem, to suggest a powerful, if largely inhibited, sexual involvement.”

“But, in fact, what might be sexual in feeling is largely transposed into something beyond sexuality, beyond eroticism even.”

“The business of the artist is to convince his audience that what they haven’t learned at the end they can’t know, or shouldn’t care about knowing.”

“My own view is that the temptation to invent more story ought to be resisted.”

“The viewer can only move toward, but never achieve, certainty about the action.”

Earlier:
Italian Vogue's "All Black" Issue: A Guided Tour

The reward: you could have your words lovingly selected and explicated in The New Yorker, as Darryl Pinckney does for his late friend Susan Sontag in his review of Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. He writes of her diaries as evidence of a "ferocious will," a voice that "never aged, perhaps in part because she did not lose her avidity for experience." She wrote:

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

And, more weirdly:

I don’t know what my real feelings are [...] That’s why I’m so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?

Pinckney's treatment of Sontag's diaries shows a brilliant mind, never at ease, always churning up not only new ideas but new selves. But the risk of keeping a diary is that it might fall into the hands of someone like Sam Anderson, who in the latest New York Magazine describes Sontag's life as "happiness-starved," calls her return to her first female lover "a sad circularity," and says, "if some researcher ever wants to study the connection between insecurity and intellectualism, Sontag’s journals would be a very good place to start."

It's hard not to prefer Pinckney's version — the journal as place of self-creation — to Anderson's journal as repository of inner anguish. A diary offers not only the chance to make a private inner life for yourself — it also allows you to be, for a time, self-absorbed. And since self-absorption is still much less accepted for women than for men, perhaps it's no wonder that Anderson wants to call it "insecurity." But writing a diary doesn't have to mean scrawling "nobody likes me" with a Hello Kitty pen; it can be a way to acknowledge that you are an interesting person and deserve to be written about — even if nobody but you ever reads it.

The Book Of Lists [The New Yorker]
Wake Up, Little Susie [New York Magazine]