Henry Leutwyler "Neverland Lost" on Center Stage
Prior to Michael Jackson's death, Henry Leutwyler photographed crates of artifacts removed from Jackson's Neverland ranch in California. The resulting series of photographs document the inner turmoil of the public person who chose to model his private life on Peter Pan and the Lost Boys -- children who never wanted to grow up. Leutwyler's unemotional portraits are almost too intimate to behold, but when one digs beneath the surface, what emerges is the profound truth of a star's sequestered reality. Leutwyler's photographs unearth the "Lost Boy" forced to leave Neverland, and now these still lifes are as close as anyone will ever get to what Jackson once had, and ultimately left behind. "I have an urge to investigate people I have never met" says Swiss-born Henry Leutwyler. With twenty-five years experience creating portraits that document the famous and powerful, he has turned his gaze on the belongings that surround the individual. A self-taught youth who began his career by photographing "cheese and chocolates," Leutwyler is a visual archaeologist. His work drills deep, allowing the objects to reveal more than the subjects themselves.
Through the cool, documentary scrutiny of Leutwyler's lens, the taxonomic portraits give a glimpse into the inner turmoil of a man caught between the public persona of one of the greatest entertainers of all time and his troubled and sequestered private life. The famous sparkling socks that peeked out from glittery shoes turn out to be ordinary white tube socks decorated with rhinestones. Sequined shirts decked out with sashes and epaulets bear traces of makeup and sweat. Perhaps for the first time, we see their mundanity. But as demystifying and unsentimental as these portraits may be, in Neverland Lost Leutwyler creates a catalogue of images that are almost too intimate to behold.
Henry Leutwyler is an internationally acclaimed photographer. A creative force in Paris for a decade, he moved to New York in 1996 where he lives with his wife and children. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Esquire and Fortune.
For the past few years the 48-year-old Swiss-born magazine photographer has been taking, by stealth, pictures of notorious objects, such as the gun that Mark Chapman used to kill John Lennon, and celebrities' private possessions, including Elvis Presley's wallet, containing a picture of the singer with his daughter, Lisa Marie, as a baby and his identity card. "I had come across the Lennon gun while working on a story about illegal gun trading, and there it was, in a New York police station, with the bullets used to kill him," says Leutwyler. He shows me his photo of the gun used by Jack Ruby to kill Lee Harvey Oswald (accused of assassinating President Kennedy) and says that he is fiercely anti-firearms, especially after being mugged at gunpoint four years ago.
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