Artist of the Week: Timeless Photography by Annie Leibovitz
“If I didn’t have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.”
-Annie Leibovitz
Graphic design, and, in fact, design in general, is an extremely interdisciplinary field. Designers draw their inspiration from many places and many fields, artistic and not. For one designer, their main inspiration source may be illustration and the rich tradition of painting and drawing in Western Culture, while for another design inspiration may come from architecture. To a third, the field they draw most of their creative energy from may be photography.
This article is dedicated to that third designer and, indeed, to all photography enthusiasts. It is a showcase of the life and work of the stunning portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, who has, in the past, worked with Rolling Stone Magazine, Vanity Fair Magazine and many other prestigious publications.
To start with the beginning, photographer Anna-Lou Leibovitz was born on October 2nd 1949 in the Connecticut town of Waterbury. Her father was a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and her mother a modern dance instructor. She had five siblings.
She is a third-generation American, with her fathers’ parents being Romanian immigrants to the US, while her mother was of Estonian Jewish descent.
During Leibovitz’s’ childhood, her family moved around a lot, due to her fathers’ profession. The first photographs the future portraitist took were taken during the Vietnam War, when her father and her family were stationed in the Philippines.
She attended high school in the city of Silver Spring, Maryland at Northwood High School. This is the period when she first became interested in art.
The future photographer pursued this interest in the artistic endeavour by enrolling in the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967. Here she studied painting. It was during this time, though, that her love for photography became manifest. At the Institute, she was heavily influenced in her view of photography by American photographer Robert Frank and French photographer and father of photojournalism Henri Cartier-Bresson, of whose works she states that “their style of personal reportage – taken in a graphic way – was what we were taught to emulate.”
After a brief period spent in the Israeli kibbutz of Amir in 1969, Leibovitz returned to the U.S. in 1970 and applied for a job at Rolling Stone magazine, a start-up publication at the time. This application was immediately accepted by editor Jann Werner and Annie Leibovitz became a staff photographer for Rolling Stone that same year.
Two years later, in 1972, the 23 year old Leibovitz became chief photographer of the magazine she was working with. She would hold on to this title for the 10 following years, up to 1982.
It’s time now to take a break from this mini-biography to talk about the characteristic style of photographer Annie Leibovitz, as this was the period when her trademark style developed.
Her technique was based on the use of strong colors and of surprising poses, melding the two into eerily beautiful and surreal portraits.
According to Werner, it is due to this trademark Leibovitz style that many Rolling Stone Magazine covers have become collector’s items subsequently.
It was during her work with Rolling Stone Magazine that Leibovitz became more aware of the other magazines and the way other photographers worked. She was especially influenced by the work of fashion photographer Richard Avedon, from whom she learned that one could work for magazines and still create personal and intimate work, a central concern for the photographer who is, first and foremost, an artist.
A chief pursuit of hers has always been the creation of intimate moments with her subjects, in order to get them to “open their hearts and souls and lives” to her, the photographer.
It was at the beginning of her collaboration with Rolling Stone Magazine, more precisely in 1971 and 1972 that Annie Leibovitz photographed The Rolling Stones in San Francisco. This collaboration with the famous rock band made it possible for her to later become the official tour photographer for the Rolling Stones Tour of the Americas ‘75.
Three years after the Rolling Stones Tour, in 1978, Annie Leibovitz became the first woman photographer to ever photograph British singer, songwriter and guitarist Joan Armatrading for an album, doing all the photography for the British three-time Grammy Award nominee’s fifth studio album, “To The Limit”, for which she spent four days in Armatrading’s house in order to catch all the images.
Close to the end of her collaboration with Rolling Stone Magazine, on December 8th 1980, Annie Leibovitz had a photoshoot with John Lennon just hours before the Beatles’ death.
While Leibovitz initially wanted to get a photo of just Lennon, the former Beatle insisted that Yoko Ono also be in the image. This prompted the Rolling Stone photographer to recreate the kissing scene from the 1980 Double Fantasy album cover, an image that she loved.
In order to do so, she had John take off his clothes and curl up next to Yoko on the floor.
She describes this shoot extremely vividly and, while tempted to retell it, we feel that it wouldn’t do this passage justice, so we will instead just reproduce the exact quote in which she talks about the picture and the relationship between Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as how the two related to the photographer.
Leibovitz says about this shoot that “What is interesting is she said she’d take her top off and I said, ‘Leave everything on’ — not really preconceiving the picture at all. Then he curled up next to her and it was very, very strong. You couldn’t help but feel that he was cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her. I think it was amazing to look at the first Polaroid and they were both very excited. John said, ‘You’ve captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it’ll be on the cover.’ I looked him in the eye and we shook on it.”
In 1983, Leibovitz went on to work with entertainment magazine Vanity Fair, where her range of subjects was much wider than the one she had before, when working with Rolling Stone. It was during her time spent with this magazine that she photographed presidents, teen heartthrobs and literary icons.
In the late 1980s, the American photographer went on to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns, the most notable of which being the American Express “Membership” campaign.
In 1991, about 200 black and white as well as color photographs of hers were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and, that same year, a book of the photographs came out and accompanied the exhibition.
In 1996, Leibovitz became the official photographer of the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. A number of black and white portraits taken in this period, including photographs of American athletes Michael Johnson and Carl Lewis have been published in her book titled “Olympic Portraits”.
The American photographer went on to publish another book, titled “Women”, in 1999. This book was accompanied by an essay written by Leibovitz’s friend and novelist Susan Sontag. The book presented a vast array of female images, ranging from Supreme Court judges to Las Vegas showgirls, farmers and coal miners.
More recently, in 2005, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has done a retrospective of Leibovitz’s work titled “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005”.
Annie Leibovitz is still working to this day, focusing on her artistic work and exhibiting and publishing, so do keep an eye out for any coming exhibitions or books of hers!
What follows is a selection of our favorite Annie Leibovitz photographs. We’ve fallen in love with the work of this brilliant portrait artist and photographer and we’re sure that you will too!
1. William S. Burroughs
2. Sting
3. Whoopi Goldberg
4. Mikhail Baryshnikov
5. Yoko Ono
6. Nicole Kidman
That pretty much wraps up our look into the life and work of one of the American masters of photography, Annie Leibovitz. We’re absolutely enamoured with her work and we’re positive that, by now, so are you.
What are your favorite Leibovitz photos? Let us know by leaving us a comment in the section below!
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