Devon McGowan: 2014

Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.

In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatle graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.

When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz followed suit. “In school, I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught black-and-white,” she told ARTnews in 1992. “So I had to learn color myself.” Among her subjects from that period are Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, shirtless and gritty.

In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, the photographer’s first book, was published in 1983. The same year Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk and Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. (The cover showing Moore — which then-editor Tina Brown initially balked at running — was named second best cover from the past 40 years.) Since then Leibovitz has photographed celebrities ranging from Brad Pitt to Mikhail Baryshnikov. She’s shot Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton. She’s shot Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley nude, with Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights; and, recently, the world’s long-awaited first glimpse of Suri Cruise, along with parents Tom and Katie. Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.

A couple of years ago, seeking solace during what she describes as “financial difficulties that were distracting in the extreme,” Annie Leibovitz took time out from her professional assignments to embark on an evolving, open-ended photographic journey that led her from coast to coast and to England and back, exploring places that intrigued her and the vestiges of lives gone by—a project that gradually took shape as a book. From the dauntingly resilient American architecture of geysers, mountains, and waterfalls to the homes of a panoply of historical figures from Emerson to Elvis Presley, Leibovitz sinks her teeth into a sizable chunk of our cultural heritage, taking us ever deeper inside the experience. The view from the window of the greenhouse where Virginia Woolf wrote her novels, Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable garden at Monticello, an etching copied onto the walls of the Alcott family home in Massachusetts by May Alcott (the inspiration for Amy in Little Women) scale down our perception of these large personalities to intensely human dimensions and draw us into the intimate texture of their lives. And when Leibovitz focuses her lens even more tightly on objects—the chaise longue, found upended in a closet, that Freud died on; Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress; the worn and broken pastels Georgia O’Keeffe worked with—the results are almost shockingly disarming.

On her travels, as Leibovitz examined some of the early uses of photography and strove to recapture images past—for days she chased the clouds in Yosemite that Ansel Adams saw—she found history to be at times elusive and at others, startlingly present. “We try to hold on to things every which way we can, and there are a few things that remain and stay,” she observes. And her pilgrimage did its work, providing Leibovitz with a sense of reconnection. “It’s good to rethink and try to see what’s in front of you. It refreshed my eye.”

On the future of photography, Leibovitz said “I think photography is stronger and better than ever before. Those of us who are photographers, the difference between us and everyone else is that we take what we do very seriously. There was a wonderful article in the New Republic that said photography came along long before there were cameras. We were always trying to capture the fleeting image. Photography came along long before we had the equipment. What is going to happen now is that we are the sensitive matter. You, the photographer, are the sensitive matter. What makes an impression on you is what will been seen. In this day and age of things moving so, so fast, we still long for things to stop, and we as a society love the still image. Every time there is some terrible or great moment, we remember the stills.” On the line between photojournalism and art she said “I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude. I realized I couldn’t be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved. It doesn’t mean we don’t need photojournalism. I think what happened to me is that I started to set up the covers of Rolling Stone magazine and I began to see more things set up and I saw there was a power in that. After that, I couldn’t go back to just journalism. But I still love the photo on the front page of the New York Times. It’s very, very important to me—I love to see how they use it, I love to see how they edit it. Those who want to be serious photographers, you’re really going to have to edit your work. You’re going to have to understand what you’re doing. You’re going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do.” On the famous photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Leibovitz said “As much as I’m not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it’s quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you. I love to take family pictures for that reason because there’s a dynamic. The hardest thing to do, actually, is a single person image because then it’s just me relating to that person. So with John and Yoko I sometimes think that photograph was 10 years in the making. I’d met John Lennon when I photographed him in my twenties and had just begun working for Rolling Stone. Then, there we were in NYC in 1980. He’d just finished the album Double Fantasy, and I’d seen the cover, which was both of them kissing. I was so moved by that kiss. There was so much in that simple picture of a kiss. It wasn’t unusual to imagine them with their clothes off, because they did that all the time. But what happened was at the last minute was that Yoko didn’t want to take her clothes off. We went ahead with the shoot [and] ended up with this very striking picture. Of course, beyond all control, he was murdered that afternoon.” On the art versus science of being a photographer, Leibovitz stated, “I don’t think of myself as a very good technical photographer. I’m so sensitive. I’m very careful about who I let around me when I work because I feel everything that’s going on. I’m still learning about digital, the way we all are. In fact, some of the early work in the Disney campaign, I want to go back and redo now that the technology is better. Or maybe my eye is better. If there’s any secret to the sauce here in terms of the art part of it, I think early on I just did what I wanted to do, and I have to make sure that I’m working with people who will let me do that. If that can happen, I think it works out. There are not too many people who will work with you like that. You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can’t. It’s important to stay the course. I don’t think I would have lasted this long if I’d listened to anyone. You have to listen somewhat and then put that to the side and know that what you do matters.”

Leibovitz has produced a book without people, yet portraits are everywhere on its pages, and in them a profound sense of life’s bold fragility and art’s imperfect beauty. On a visit to Julia Margaret Cameron’s Isle of Wight home Leibovitz writes, “Cameron’s printing was inconsistent and parts of the pictures were soft, but they were never boring. There was something beautiful about not being in control all the time. Not being totally proficient. It was magic.”Among other honors, Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and toured internationally for six years. At the time she was only the second living portraitist — and the only woman — to be featured in an exhibition by the institution.

Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz said in an interview with The New York Times late last year. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag’s death in late 2004.

Sontag’s influence on Leibovitz was profound. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans, a trip that she admits she would not have taken without Sontag’s input. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on blood-smeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume.

Leibovitz’s most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, includes her trademark celebrity portraits. But it also features personal photographs from Leibovitz’s life: her parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews, and Sontag. Leibovitz, who has called the collection “a memoir in photographs,” was spurred to assemble it by the deaths of Sontag and her father, only weeks apart. The book even includes photos of Leibovitz herself, like the one that shows her nude and eight months pregnant, à la Demi Moore. That picture was taken in 2001, shortly before Leibovitz gave birth to daughter Sarah. Daughters Susan and Samuelle, named in honor of Susan and Leibovitz’s father, were born to a surrogate in 2005.

Leibovitz composed these personal photographs with materials that she used when she was first starting out in the ’70s: a 35-millimeter camera, black-and-white Tri X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Still, she told the Times, this book is the “most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683295/annie-leibovitz-on-getting-the-shot-and-the-future-of-photography

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/annie-leibovitz/life-through-a-lens/16/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/335335/Annie-Leibovitz

Interviews and Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2lbAN-_0A0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QobrHm1bIfo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNyIUlra9LU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyKFLyxQJJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhjEQpEGvaQ

Word List: extravagant, fairytale, colorful, organized, dynamic, well-lit, energetic, refined, soulful, dramatic, enigmatic, strong, simple, chaotic, dazzling, romantic, edgy, classical, poignant, powerful, climactic, triangular composition, exciting, vivid, striking, impressive, theatrical, beauty, movement, contemplative, brilliance, churning, sunlight, story-telling, pensive, natural, performance, rich, flashy, picturesque, showy, focused, concentrated, chiaroscuro, sfumato, wind-blown, personal, sunlit, spirited, lively, tireless.

Key words: Soulful- of or expressive of deep feeling or emotion

Romantic- of, pertaining to, or of the nature of romance; characteristic or suggestive of the world of romance

Personal- of, pertaining to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private

Refined- very subtle, precise, or exact

Rich- abounding with color and texture

Dazzling- to impress deeply; astonish with delight

Compound words: well-lit beauty, classically theatrical, tirelessly focused, powerfully rich, vividly personal, dramatically soulful.