Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 is currently showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition presents over 190 works by the photographer, including her portraits of well-known politicians and artists, Hollywood’s elite, landscape works, and personal photographs. The presentation is stunning, impressive, and raw, and having been an avid reader of Vogue and Vanity Fair for years I recognized many of her most famous images that have graced the pages of those publications. But it is the personal documentation of her life that really moved me, including her aging parents, travels with her partner Susan, and the birth of her three children.
Annie LeibovitzIn 1993 I accepted a contract with Conde Nast Traveler explicitly because I wanted to do landscape work. They asked me where I wanted to go first, and I said Monument Valley, and they said fine. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was summer, and the best time to take pictures was in the early morning, around four or five, and at the end of the day, in the last light, which wasn’t until eleven o’clock. In between, there were long stretches of scorching, hot, bright sun. It was miserable. Besides that, every other American photographer had come to Monument Valley and taken pictures, and I had set myself up to compete with them. For three or four days I exhausted myself by driving around in the heat looking for ‘the spot’ where the picture should be taken. I had booked a helicopter, but I felt guilty because it seemed like cheating. At the end of the very last day, I told myself that Ansel Adams would have rented a helocipter…
