da Scriffles

I went to see Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life 1990-2005 last week at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.

I see it's been extended into April. 

Surprising to me that this collection captures the struggle of life and death in today's youth and beauty and fame and wealth obsessed world.

Though once upon a time it was not unknown to take a funeral assembly photograph with the open casket, I wonder if any of these famous people would let her photograph their corpse - or would any magazine publish a photograph of the corpse of a famous "it"/"in" thing.

But here in this collection Leibovitz includes death, alongside youth and beauty, and fame and wealth. She photographs indiscriminately and unashamedly.

She shows photos of her dead lover, Susan Sontag, and photos of her parents in bed just days before her father died - extraordinary family documents in this day and age.

It wasn't the big portraits hung in crowded halls that impressed me most. I only became fascinated when I entered the little corridor of snapshots perhaps used to plan this exhibition.

They are all pinned to a board in horizontal lines across two walls. I think it's effect is stronger than the actual exhibition because all the images are here together in a confined space.

The strongest photograph for me was an abandoned bike on a sidewalk smeared with blood in Sarajevo - a sniper had just murdered a teenage boy.

The plaque beside a beautiful photograph of her mother tells how she cried behind the camera as she took the photograph despite her mother's concerns that she would look old - that's what her daughter wanted to capture and her mother knew it but allowed her to take it anyway.

It is a picture of honesty, a communication between mother and daughter. But that don't pay the bills. I bought a copy of Vanity Fair at the airport for $10 - the cost of entry to the collection is $15. 

Correction: Well, almost today ... at least just three days ago

My grandmother used to take me up the corrugated dirt easement leading to the gate of her farm when I was a toddler to collect the paper - the Telegraph which no longer exists.

The bush was full of fluffy yellow wattle. The street was a dirt road. And the noise of the freeways and Gateways and tollways was decades away.

The little walk up the road was Baba's way of stopping my tears when mum dropped me off and left to go to work.

"Let's go collect the newspaper," she would tell me. I named her Baba Gazetta (gazetta is newspaper in Russian). She was always Baba Gazetta in our family. 

My brother and I raised dust in this quiet place climbing umbrella trees to scramble through the second-story window, running through the dark of the night with sheets over our heads playing ghosts.

My grandmother talked about lyre birds, borers (the kind that bore through wooden furniture) and barbed wire.

She milked the cows, fed the chickens, raised six daughters and never learned to drive.

Baba Gazetta died on Monday about 1am in a Brisbane nursing home. She died alone in a strange place after breaking her hip.

At 2am on Monday I sat beside her body with my mother and my aunts.

The nursing home staff had combed Baba's eyebrows and her false teeth stuck out strangely. 

"Are you sure it's her?" I asked my mother.

But her name was above the bed - along with a spooky piece of black ruffled plastic stuck on the ceiling.

I imagined lying in this bed having to look at this black thing above me - it would be even more frightening if all you could see is a black blur.

She'd spent four weeks in hospital after a hip operation - they tried to make her walk at 93 after a hip operation.

And they were surprised when she couldn't. The reason she broke her hip was that she could not get out of bed, let alone walk that day.

It wasn't long before she stopped talking and seemed angry.

She started wringing her hands, wringing the sheets, grabbing the doctor by the tie and yanking him toward her.

Through her last ordeal she wasn't wearing her hearing aids - but people still talked at her in her face and called her "cutie".

As we sat at 2am with the fluorescent lights blazing in a room where three other old women lay in their beds behind drawn curtains - people discussed things ... things ... like parking, giving her clothes to the second-hand shop, how she died peacefully in her sleep. The stories we tell ourselves are so scary.

Baba's only possessions were a few clothes and photos of all her grandchildren and great grandchildren which made her happy. She was a gentle woman - it's a difficult thing to be.

We've lost something.

Does it take an earthquake followed by a tsunami followed by a nuclear crisis to bring silence into the world?

Why aren’t you happy?

It’s because ninety-nine percent of everything you do,

and think, and say, is for yourself

— and there isn’t one. – Wu Wei Wu