“Something you see in each of my paintings is that I’ve never had a doubt about falling in love with these people.” With these words, Annie Leibovitz, the great stage artist of pop and rock culture, explains that only with court reporter for the beautiful, creative and rich, equipped with a camera and her mischievous charm, why her photos perhaps shine a little more and are also more famous than many of her colleagues.
Annie Leibovitz has remained a phenomenon since she confidently applied to be a photographer for ROLLING STONE in 1970 (while still a painting and photography student at the San Francisco Art Institute) and with her photo portfolio and images equally inspired by street photography and Frank Capra were so enthusiastic about Henri Cartier-Bresson, magazine founder Jann S. Wenner, that he immediately hired her as his house photographer. A stroke of luck for both sides. She worked permanently for the magazine until 1983 and developed an intimate approach to the musicians that was second to none. She accompanied the people portrayed for several days in order to immerse themselves in their lives and press the shutter button at the right moment or to propose a scenario that suited their personality all round. One can say without false modesty that Leibovitz helped to invent the idea of musicians as real stars with her pictures.
This was also due to the fact that her photos, which paradoxically express her carelessness from a very careful choreography and an almost psychoanalytically trained method of letting the unconscious speak (just think of the legendary ROLLING STONE cover by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, written shortly before the Beatle’s death), always have something unreal about them. As if Leibovitz knew something about her clients that had to remain hidden from others because only she was allowed to get that close.
The Cover of the Rolling Stone
This does not always have something to do with a spiritual truth, the photographer has always remained meticulously true to her ideals and worked harder than almost anyone else to implement her vision. This would hardly have been possible without the graphic designer Bea Feitler, who became something of a mentor to Leibovitz. Thanks in part to her, the photographer developed from authentic street photography to an icon painter with a camera. If the lack of a concept and the fresh look at something that already existed was her method of choice before, it was now the other way around: a clever setting of the framework. Her ingenious pictures adorned the cover of ROLLING STONE and, thanks to their expressiveness and originality, ensured that the first page of the music magazine itself became a legend. Who wouldn’t want to be on the cover of ROLLING STONE?
Most recently, she got the football gods Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi in front of the lens for a chess game in Paris. Before their last major World Cup tournament – and the only chance now that they still have the opportunity to win the World Cup with their nations. Two gladiators as thoughtful strategists, but also without eye contact. enemies? At least rivals. The rumor circulated early on that Leibovitz couldn’t bring the two together and stitched the photo from two individual sessions. And it speaks for the now 73-year-old that this lack then becomes a strength of her production. Because what more clarified the almost extraterrestrial social character of these exceptional athletes that they don’t want to give up their distance for such a picture.
Leibovitz’s career, of course, has a rock ‘n’ roll element of its own, so her reputation has remained that of an ambitious seeker, albeit one who quickly outstripped the success of the media she worked for. After Leibovitz had illustrated rock music and became addicted to drugs after a work trip with the Rolling Stones, she sought a new challenge in the early 1980s by founding “Vanity Fair”. Here she gets mesmerizing nudes that never had anything sleazy (Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore), but always remained playful and in a childish way bashful and adventurous. Of course, this was also the time when advertising and fashion photography was booming – and Leibovitz, for example for “Vogue”, appropriated it.
She tried her hand at a wide variety of fields with great vigour, photographed athletes or devoted herself to nude portraits for the Pirelli calendar. The stylish boldness with which she was then also allowed to stage Queen Elizabeth II proves the influence she had in her late heyday – after all the many well-known motifs she had created, after a frightening debt crisis and the illustrations, which were felt to be tasteless the death of her famous life partner Susan Sontag – was still able to exercise.
There are numerous illustrated books that contain essential photographs by Annie Leibovitz. They are all beaten by a so-called sumo volume, which was published by Taschen-Verlag in 2014 and is almost wordless, but in the best photo quality and in a broad framework that does justice to Leibovitz’ visionary pictorial ideas, the most important photos from many decades at the camera includes. The 26-kilogram tome was limited to just a few copies at the time, but has now been published again in a more manageable, no-frills XXL edition.
“The book is very personal and tells its story with the means of pop culture,” Leibovitz says of the book. “It’s not in chronological order and it’s not a retrospective. It’s more of a roller coaster ride.” And that might be an apt image, for a photo reporter at Vanity Faire who, while always taking herself very seriously, made her art into a grand fair.
Annie Leibovitz SUMO
Annie Leibovitz, Steve Martin, Graydon Carter,
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul Roth
Hardcover in slipcase, 27.1 x 37.4 cm, 5.80 kg,
556 pages
€125
BAGS
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