On the Shelf
Annie Leibovitz: Ladies
By Annie Leibovitz with essays by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem Phaidon Press: 493 pages, $100
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Annie Leibovitz strides onto the Wiltern stage to the thunderous cheers of 1,500 principally feminine followers. She takes her place on the podium, a small, casually dressed determine on a giant stage. On the display screen behind her are photographs of the matching covers of her new two-book set, “Annie Leibovitz: Women.” Quantity 1 is her 1999 assortment. Quantity 2 has 100 new images captured within the 25 years since. Taken collectively, the slipcased set zooms in on the previous quarter century of American womankind, rendered in 250 photographs of dancers, actors, astronauts, artists, politicians, farmers, writers, CEOs, philanthropists, troopers, musicians, athletes, socialites and scientists.
“The book was Susan’s idea,” Leibovitz says on Tuesday, referring to author Susan Sontag, her accomplice till Sontag’s demise in 2004. “I thought doing a photo book about women was a bad idea, like going out and photographing the ocean. But then I heard what Hillary Clinton said at the U.N. Conference on Women in 1995 — ‘Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights’ — and I reconsidered.” Applause shakes the Wiltern rafters.
A picture from Quantity 2 seems, that includes a somber-looking Sontag. “This is the last formal portrait of Susan,” Leibovitz says. “You could think she’s projecting a sense of strength, but really, she was mad at me for making her go outside to take the picture.” The group roars with laughter.
Consider Leibovitz, and a few legendary pictures spring to thoughts. Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a milk-filled bathtub on the duvet of Vainness Truthful, July 1984. Additionally on VF covers: Michael Jackson, fittingly clothed and shot in black-and-white, in 1989. Demi Moore, totally pregnant and totally bare, two years later. However the picture that continues to be Leibovitz’s most iconic up to now is the January 1981 cowl of Rolling Stone that includes a nude, fetal John Lennon wrapped round Yoko Ono. “John showed up naked,” Leibovitz tells the viewers. “Yoko wanted to wear clothes, so she’s fully dressed.” Leibovitz took the Polaroid on Dec. 8, 1980 — a couple of steps away from, and some hours earlier than, Lennon was shot and killed by former fan Mark David Chapman.
Joan Baez in Woodside, Calif., in 2007, from “Annie Leibovitz: Women.”
(Annie Leibovitz)
In Quantity 2, we discover a barefoot Joan Baez sitting in a tree strumming her guitar; a pregnant Rihanna draped in jewels and fur; Billie Eilish dreaming over a journal with pencil in hand; Shonda Rhimes together with her ft up on a desk as large as her oeuvre; and an uninhibited Michelle Obama as we’ve by no means seen her earlier than: chin raised, eyes closed, hair tossed again, T-shirt and denims parted to disclose her midriff. “I was in shock,” Leibovitz says. “But the first lady’s assistant was standing next to me, shouting, ‘That’s my first lady!’”
Acquainted faces dominate, however woven between them are portraits of “regular” American girls. A botanist precedes Oprah Winfrey, a philanthropist and a rabbi encompass the founding father of a Skid Row nonprofit, the reproductive rights activists of Mothers Demand Motion share area with a nude Girl Gaga. “I told her to bring a slip,” Leibovitz feedback. “I’d rather people keep their clothes on at this point in my life.”
Quantity 2 consists of one essay every from activist Gloria Steinem, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Leibovitz herself. Steinem writes, “This book will help us to discover our adventurous true selves. … We are atoms whirling in place, affected by and affecting those near and far from where we are.”
Adichie agrees. “Taken as a whole,” she writes, “these photographs create a deeply moving experience, they refute the singular lens, they revel in plurality’s power, and because of — or perhaps in spite of — their wide range, they are infused with a spirit that is communal, collective, even unifying — and ultimately hopeful.”
Leibovitz concludes the second e book. “For this volume I thought about issues that are important today,” she writes. In 2016, when she was starting work on Quantity 2, the notoriously cloistered Leibovitz advised a New York Occasions reporter concerning the nationwide “talking circles” she and Steinem had organized, wherein girls shared their experiences with points together with sexual violence, know-how and human rights. “Talking in groups like that, it brings me to tears,” Leibovitz advised the reporter, including that the brand new work she was making for Quantity 2 was extra “democratic.” Quantity 2 is certainly extra various, probably in response to a extensively mentioned critique of Leibovitz’s pictures of Black girls.
No movie star survives fame with out buying a layer or two of tarnish. Within the many years between Volumes 1 and a pair of, Leibovitz’s representations of Black girls painted Leibovitz with hers. A 2022 Guardian story was headlined, “Annie Leibovitz proves yet again: she can’t photograph Black women.”
“Leibovitz’s photographs are what happens when Blackness is seen through a white gaze incapable of capturing its true beauty,” contributor Tayo Bero wrote, referring to an inventory of Leibovitz topics together with Simone Biles, Viola Davis, Serena Williams and Rihanna. Bero wrote, “In all cases, she manages to make her subjects look dull, ashy, pained and sad, a far cry from the lively and graceful people that they usually are.”
Bero and others significantly criticized a picture Leibovitz made for Vogue, depicting Supreme Courtroom Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Lincoln Memorial. Within the picture, the snow-white marble statue takes heart stage, overlooking Brown Jackson on the decrease left. On the Wiltern, when that picture seems, Leibovitz speaks of her personal expertise capturing it, not the controversy surrounding its publication. “I was skeptical about that idea,” Leibovitz says. “But she walked into the rotunda and she started reading Lincoln’s words that are engraved into the wall. It was such a moving moment.”
Two years later, the controversy was reawakened by Leibovitz’s depictions of Zendaya, additionally in Vogue. An April 2024 piece on the web site Screenshot Media reiterated the images’ failure to precisely mirror “the beauty of melanated skin tones, with poor lighting that often results in lackluster portrayals.”
In her introductory essay to Quantity 2, Adichie, alternatively, praises Leibovitz’s sensitivity. “The first time Annie photographed me, more than ten years ago at my home, she sensed my discomfort right away and knew it was not merely about my general awkwardness with being photographed. It was specifically about my belly, which was newly postpartum, although I would probably still have worried even if it wasn’t. … Annie’s sanguine reaction was a relief. There was no divisiveness, no judgment.”
Rihanna on the Ritz Resort, Paris, in 2022, from “Annie Leibovitz: Women.”
(Annie Leibovitz)
Annie Leibovitz entered the San Francisco Artwork Institute at 22, aspiring to be a painter. However an evening pictures class she took on a whim modified her medium, and her life. Whereas nonetheless a pupil, manifesting the arrogance that will characterize her profession, Leibovitz pitched a Lennon shoot to Rolling Stone. Three years later, rendered immortal as the ultimate photographer of Lennon and Ono, Leibovitz turned Rolling Stone’s chief photographer.
In 1983, Leibovitz joined the employees of Vainness Truthful, the place her subject of exploration, and her social sphere, expanded to incorporate actors, athletes and politicians. In 1991, she turned the primary girl to have a solo present on the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She was designated a Library of Congress Residing Legend in 2000.
In 2001, at age 52, Leibovitz gave delivery to her first daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz. Sontag was at her bedside. In Could 2005, by way of surrogate, Leibovitz turned the mom of dual daughters, Susan (named for her beloved painter sister) and Samuelle. In 2009, Leibovitz was commissioned to make the official portrait of the primary household — President Barack Obama; his spouse, Michelle; and their daughters, Sasha and Malia — persevering with the connection that started in 2004 when she photographed Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate.
“I want to photograph the White House,” Leibovitz says, “but I don’t think there will be much of it left when I get to it.” The night ended because it started: with the enthusiastic applause of her viewers.
