The Cruellest Month

Being Quiet for Annie Leibovitz

You go to the sandstone Museum of Modern Art with Raphael and Rod. Annie Leibovitz. You have been meaning to go for weeks, now months, and are grateful for the extension of the season. The russet goldy light of autumn Sydney, the rough blonde of the sandstone, the photographs displayed upon the walls, are perfect. You step from image to image, colour, black and white, portrait, landscape, personal and professional. You dodge others viewing at a different speed or in another order. You read the texts that run with the photographs, sometimes in sync with Raph or Rod, or, sometimes, not.

"I don't have two lives"
fifteen years of life and work
Photographer's Life

In a large room central to a series of smaller rooms there are large black and white landscapes. You glance at them. You recognise that they are good but you do not care. It registers that the landscapes are each in three tall panels and need the wide space in order to be properly visible. Trees, a waterfall, but you prefer pictures of people. Brad Pitt sprawled blank on a hotel bed with a shirt that does not match his trousers; Johnny Depp's head on the belly of nude Kate Moss, whose eyes gleam lasciviously at the camera: Raphael quickly looking away from Demi Moore's breasts on her pregnant belly, encircled by Bruce Willis' arms and clasped hands.


father and brother
folded arms before dark hedge
tender smiles direct

Most people are quiet in the gallery. A gallery is like a library where being quiet shows respect. People are also quiet in the gallery because everyone else is quiet. If they were to speak, their voice would be clearly heard, by others. Some people are intimidated by art, and by others, because they don't know the right thing to say. Nobody is an idiot. You can't not notice a group of tourists who are not being quiet, but who are commenting constantly with each other as they surge through the space. They are confident because they are speaking in Portugeuse (you think) and this gives them a certain security in privacy. Everyone wants privacy when viewing a work of art.

huge keyhole through stone
Susan Sontag at Petra
tiny silhouette

A photograph is about being quiet. Being still and quiet. The image is silent, the image is motionless. You like the life and the liveliness that is captured in smiles and eyes. The endless information in faces, or in the body's lines. Baryshnikov, on angled display by the sea, held high by Rob Besserer, of whom you've never heard, is a narrative. The arms and legs are vectors. They are not quite in the centre of the shot. Iggy Pop leather man, you cannot get past somebody else's metaphor, a condom full of wallnuts, but the intensity of his face is sexy to you, in a sunken-cheeked and tortured kind of way.

Elizabeth II
apocalyptic twilight
sepia stately

You find Raph staring at a shot of smears and footprints up a wall in a cement bathroom. He says, That is like a horror movie but it really happened, in Rwanda. He is a little shocked. The photograph is confronting because it requires you to imagine the events in real time before the photograph was taken. He walks back to the waterfalls and trees in the centre of the gallery. In his private autism he is comforted by landscape while in yours you need human faces. William Burroughs is captivating. He is safer than blood footprints. His quizzical, sad, reproachful face meets yours through the glass.

Patti Smith, her kids
the cat, piano, guitar
black and white repose

You like the White Stripes in a circus knife-throwing scenario, with trademark red on the white stripes on the wheel and balls, Meg White all long legs and a cocks-comb of a red feather on her head. You do not want to like Nicole Kidman in gold and silver with celestial triangles of light illuminating the excessive froth of her hem. You like Leonardo di Caprio brooding with a swan around his shoulders, and you like the shots unframed, in real size, clipped to long hanging curtains in chronological order. Leibovitz's babies. She had her first at fifty-one, which gives you an irrational hope for a third at forty-five. She had help while you are leaving it to nature or to god, and blessed anyway. Your son is getting restless and pacey. It is time to go. He says, back out before the sparkling steel-blue harbour, "I am not sorry I went. That was really, really good."

an inner quiet
shrill outside the gallery
pictures in your head



April 16—being quiet