Simultaneously an artist, photojournalist and commercial photographer, Annie Leibovitz has played a seminal role in the business of image-making in the late twentieth century. Her work, which has appeared in American and European magazines such as Time, Stern, Paris-Match, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue, documents society’s preoccupation with celebrity and appearance. Her methods of articulating the essence of the star persona have revealed her as a keen interpreter of popular culture.
An unwitting pioneer of the women’s movement, Leibovitz carved her own path to success in a largely male-dominated industry, and has continued to help reshape perceptions of female identity.
The daughter of an Air Force officer and a professional dancer, Leibovitz was born in Westport, Connecticut, in 1949. She enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967 and began studying painting at a time when minimalism and post-painterly abstraction were considered the only viable means of expression. Feeling a greater affinity for realism, Leibovitz began to explore other forms of artistic expression. Her study of painting, however, gave her a strong sense of composition that has informed her photographic work.
In the summer of 1968, Leibovitz joined her parents at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where her father was stationed. Her mother had the opportunity to travel to Japan and took Leibovitz with her. On the trip, Leibovitz bought her first professional camera, a Minolta SRT101, and began taking amateur photographs, which she developed herself in the base’s hobby shop. Upon her return to the Art Institute, she began taking night classes in photography.
While at school, Leibovitz studied with Ralph Gibson, who introduced her to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank.
Initially, she was drawn less to portraiture than to studies of places and environments. This interest was sparked by the early photo essays in Life magazine, entire articles made up largely of entire articles expressed principally through pictures captured by a single roving journalist, such as Life’s long-time photo editor Walker Evans.
In 1970, Leibovitz approached the two-year-old San Francisco-based youth and rock magazine Rolling Stone with a photograph of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Art director Robert Kingsbury bought the portrait and introduced Leibovitz to founding editor Jann Wenner.
In 1971, Leibovitz received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. After a short independent assignment in Europe, which she took specifically to hone her skills, Leibovitz returned to Rolling Stone looking for a job and was subsequently hired on a $47.00 weekly retainer.
Leibovitz became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973 and by 1974 had photographed most of the major rock artists of the era and many of the most important political figures. She often collaborated with writer Tim Cahill, taking photographs as he gathered story material.
Her early work consisted of snapshots taken while following subjects engaged in specific activities. An example of this type of portrait is a body of work from 1975, when Leibovitz was the official concert photographer for the Rolling Stones. She travelled with the band and captured many facets of their tour, both on stage and off. Her most famous image from this period, however, is that of a naked John Lennon embracing a fully clothed Yoko Ono, taken on the day of Lennon’s murder.
Since the mid-1980s, Leibovitz’s portraits have become elaborately staged productions, highlighting the sitter’s celebrity persona or referencing an object or action that made them famous.
Rejecting the conventional close-up, Leibovitz has preferred the 35mm lens, which allows for the inclusion of contextual and conceptual details such as props. Before photographing her subjects, she admittedly studied them from different angles, looking at them from a political, psychological and sociological point of view, before determining her conceptual and compositional approach. This stylistic shift, which emphasises the contrived over the candid, reflects her move in 1983 to New York-based Condé Nast Publications, which produces the glossy fashion magazines Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Leibovitz’s mid-career also saw a brief return to her early role as a photojournalist. In 1985 she was the official photographer for the World Cup in Mexico and in 1994 she documented the aftermath of the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia.
In 1996, the Atlanta Olympic Committee commissioned Leibovitz to take portraits of the participating athletes. This assignment resulted in both a book and a travelling exhibition.
In 1991, Leibovitz became the second living and only female photographer to have a retrospective exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. That same year, in a closely watched artists’ rights case, she sued Paramount Pictures for irreverently appropriating her nude portrait of pregnant actress Demi Moore for an advertising campaign promoting Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. The image in question featured a similarly posed pregnant model’s body superimposed on the head of actor Leslie Nielsen. Paramount was acquitted of copyright infringement under the doctrine of fair use.
In 1999, Leibovitz published Women, a collaboration with the critic and essayist Susan Sontag. The book contains over 70 photographs of women, ranging from the world famous to the unknown, and cutting across ethnic and socio-economic divides.
An exhibition of the same name, featuring over 50 images from the book, each made up of four separate Iris prints, creating large-scale portraits, has been travelling to venues across the country. The book, conceived by Susan Sontag, sought to redefine conventional notions of femininity and has confirmed Leibovitz’s signature interest in the mutable concepts of identity and image.
