Shadows And Eye Candy

/ Virginia Woolf believed that human nature changed "in or about December, 1910." Actually, it must have been sometime between 1943, when Irving Penn became a photographer at Vogue, and 1983, when Annie Leibovitz moved her camera from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair. That would explain why the human race that appears in Penn's new book, a career summation called Passage (Knopf-Callaway; $100), looks so different from the one that we see in Photographs Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990 (HarperCollins; $60).

Or maybe it's just a small, exotic slice of humanity that has changed, the subspecies called celebrities. The decorous public figures in Penn's photographs have become Leibovitz's feral children. Buck naked, streaked with paint or hanging from trees, they sport through the pages of her book and across the walls of the International Center of Photography in New York City, where a retrospective of Leibovitz's work is on view through Dec. 1, before traveling across the U.S. and Europe.

In Penn's world, reputation counts for more than celebrity, and fame is no laughing matter. Posed against bare backgrounds and pressed by mortal shadows, his stalwart artists and writers are icons of modernism at its most brave, clean and reverent. Their solemnity may be a pose in itself, but it has its metaphorical power. Penn's fashion shots take on greater weight in the company of his portraits; the passage of time seems to hang over them both. They in turn magnify the effect of a third kind of picture that he started taking in 1967, when he began to haul his neutral backdrops around the world and put before them tribal warriors in New Guinea or the women of Cameroon.

At around the same time Penn was also photographing hippies and Hell's Angels, so he would have known that it was no longer necessary to travel very far to fall off the edges of Western civilization: the tribal types were gathering at home. One of their favorite spots was the backstage world of rock, where Leibovitz started shooting for Rolling Stone in 1970. It was a place where parents imagined that the wickedness of paganism converged with the self-indulgence of childhood, as if the Satyricon were being played out in the aisles of Toys "R" Us. Judging from a few of Leibovitz's early pictures -- like one of rock drummer Keith Moon trysting with his groupies -- those parents had a point. Rock had become the gateway through which the mysterious Other -- dark, hedonistic, erotically charged -- would find its way out into mass culture.