Shadows And Eye Candy

Monday, Sep. 30, 1991 By RICHARD LACAYO

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What few suspected was how quickly all of that could be put to the service of marketing, in rock videos and ad campaigns. Leibovitz has been a crucial figure in this transition. In her most talked-about portraits of the past decade, she brought a pagan abandon to the authorized depiction of celebrities, a bit of primeval fire for the image machine. All those masks and naked flesh, all that mud and body paint: what Penn found in West Africa, Leibovitz brings out in Keith Haring, Lauren Hutton and Roseanne Barr. In the 1970s she discovered that Mick Jagger looked like a wicked faun. A decade later, she applied that look to Jeff Koons, '80s art buffoon and husband of the Euro-porn star and Italian legislatrix Cicciolina. Naked, painted gold, Koons is a naughty sprite who darts a little pink tongue. By the time Leibovitz made her famous cover shot of Demi Moore, pregnant and unclothed, it was hard not to see the actress as the photographer's own version of a fertility goddess.

The paradox of Leibovitz's best-known work is that it tries to twit propriety in the slickest possible style. Which may be why so many of her subjects, no matter how manically they act up for the camera, are prone to look shrink-wrapped in their own renown. In these rich, sanitary frames, the antics can fall flat, the Bette Midlers and Steve Martins can emanate nothing so much as the fact of their famousness. In pictures that are bright, clear and eye-catching, they become the corporate logos of their own celebrity. This must be what a primal impulse looks like after it has been fully digested by the world of public relations, ad agencies and department stores. We have met the Others. They "R" Us.