Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz impresses Rolling Stone with her talent

Annie Liebowitz was born in Waterbury, Connecticut on 2 October 1949, the third of six children in a Jewish family. Her father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and her mother was a dancer and teacher of modern dance. Leibovitz became interested in photography at an early age and used her father’s many secondments to practice her talent in various places in the world, with her first pictures taken during the Vietnam war in the Philippines. The logical progression was to study photography and painting at the San Francisco Art Institute with the aim of becoming a teacher, like her mother. There she discovered, and was greatly influenced by, the photographic work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Upon presenting her portfolio at the Rolling Stone music magazine, she received the position of chief photographer, one she held from 1973 until 1981. During this time, she accompanied the Rolling Stones on tour, encountered drugs, and became addicted. She began a successful therapy in the 1980s and joined the staff of Vanity Fair in 1983.

Intimate shots of the beautiful, the rich and the powerful

Annie Leibovitz was convinced from the outset that her intimate portraits would only be successful if she herself was a part, in order to photograph not as a visitor, but as a confidante of the inner circle of her pictures. The impressive results proved the artist right: Annie Leibovitz was able to create an incomparable atmosphere with her unique pictorial ideas and her special relationship with her models, vesting every single portrait with an unparalleled character. The artist also spared no effort with her work, such as removing every single thorn from the bed of roses she created for Bette Midler to lie on. Her ideas and concepts also fell on understanding ears of even the world’s leaders: she asked for example Queen Elisabeth II of England to remove her crown – and she got her way. US President Barrack Obama posed for the photographer in the Oval Office, Demi Moore was captured heavily pregnant and totally naked, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were models for Liebowitz only a few hours before his murder – these are a few of the photographer’s most famous works. Further prestigious projects include the Pirelli calendar and a series of sport portraits.

Glamour instead of history, celebrities instead of politics

Together with her celebrities, Annie Liebowitz was also skilled at consistently capturing the respective zeitgeist. As the chronicler of popular culture, she was celebrated worldwide for her special sensibility, and highly paid for it. Her temporary partner, the publicist Susan Sontag, tried to urge Leibovitz to more political issues, visiting the Yugoslavian Civil War with her where she took a series about the siege of Sarajevo developed, and initiating the series Women, about American women. Nevertheless, Annie Leibovitz always returned to her roots and after Sontag’s death, devoted herself to the photographic documentation of the glittering world of the rich and beautiful, to which she added a good portion of glamour with her pictures. In 2009 Leibovitz was on the verge of bankruptcy and ran the risk of losing all her possessions including her art collection but was able to avert the worst by negotiating a moratorium at the last moment.