We spent several hours with photographer Annie Leibovitz this morning as she gave us a personal tour of her latest exhibition: "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005" at the High Museum of Art...
Two loves have greatly influenced Annie Leibovitz's work: her mother (a dance instructor) and writer/essayist Susan Sontag (her "lover"), who died of cancer in 2004.
It's obvious Leibovitz truly loved Sontag, as she gets a little choked up every time she talks about her. In fact, there are almost more photos of Sontag in the exhibition than there are of the celebrities Leibovitz is best known for shooting.
(Nicole Kidman, New York, 2003. Courtesy of "Vogue.")
Although Leibovitz's work mostly reflects life, she clearly doesn't like to take photos of people with smiles. In fact, you'll be hard pressed to find any of her subjects in the exhibition smiling.
"You have to understand, my family was the kind that always smiled for pictures. I just thought it was kind of... fake. In the portrait I took of my mother, she's not smiling. She thought she looked old and didn't like the photo. But at an exhibit once all these people were gathered around asking for her autograph, so she kind of liked that."
Pondering photos of lover Susan Sontag undergoing chemotherapy.
"I've recently started looking for a cemetery, which is sort of like looking for a good apartment in New York City. People are afraid to talk about death. So before my dad died, I made sure to talk to him about... those kinds of things. But I promise there's more to this exhibition than just death," she says with a laugh.
"The great thing about this photo is if you love George Bush, you love this photo. And if you hate Bush, you hate this photo. I only had 45 minutes to take it, which was a LONG time."
When asked why she thinks she's become such an icon, she says, "A lot of hard work. It's all about the work. Also I don't think of myself as a photographer. I think of myself as an artist who uses photography."
Leibovitz has been under contract as a landscape photographer with "Conde Nast Traveler" since 1993. Other contracts include "Vanity Fair," "Rolling Stone", and "Vogue."
Annie Leibovitz is no stranger to Georgia. In fact, we actually attended her first exhibition at the High Museum in 1994. Two years later Leibovitz photographed athletes at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. She also went to Cumberland Island to photograph Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer on the beach.
"Cumberland Island is an amazing place. I ended up staying with them for three weeks, which is the longest I've stayed anywhere with a subject, except for the Rolling Stones tour which I couldn't get off of for eight years!"
"I asked if I could just watch them make a dance, which is what this photo is about."
And what about that famous "Vanity Fair" cover of Demi Moore nude and pregnant 1994? "I had worked with Demi a lot, and did her wedding pictures when she married Bruce Willis. I told her then that I was interested in photographing a pregnant woman, which I had never done before."
"I shot some close-ups of Demi Moore for the magazine, and I said, 'you know, we should do some nudes just for you.'"
"Demi called me when she was pregnant with her first child. Bruce was working on a film in Kentucky, so I stopped there on the way back to New York from Los Angeles. Then three years later, when Demi had a movie coming out, 'Vanity Fair' asked me to take a picture of her for the cover. As I was shooting I said, 'You know, this would be a great cover.
'Vanity Fair' decided to go with it -- I didn't quite understand the
impact it would have on people."
"I photographed Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino standing next to each other in my studio, but I had to cut them into two separate photos because they couldn't be together."
In 1994 her most shocking photo at the High Museum was Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub filled with milk. This time around she's got Chris Rock donning "whiteface" and Beyonce as Alice in Wonderland. Clearly some things haven't changed, but a lot has, like getting to finally photograph Queen Elizabeth II. Leibovitz is the first American honored with taking her portrait.
(Brad Pitt, Las Vegas, 1994. Courtesy of "Vanity Fair.")
"They gave me 30 minutes to photograph her. She said she remembered me asking if I could photograph her years ago, and she felt bad for turning me down. The photos were good, but they were more like a document. I did a lot of research; they sent me books of her clothes and jewelry I could choose from.
I wanted to include everything, so we did the shoot at Buckingham Palace. She was a little feisty because she had to wear the whole outfit and everything -- it was a bit like photographing your 80-year old aunt. But she was great. At the end I told her I had made a bit of a mistake and needed her to come back so I could do something else, and she did."
"I got rid of my studio. It was becoming a burden, so now I prefer to shoot in the great outdoors. I'm also using a lot of digital, which I love. If I want to make it look like film I can, and it gives me a lot of leeway with color. For instance I used to not be able to shoot a subject in front of a green tree, because green looks black on film. But now I can do that. I first started using digital when I shot Barack Obama, because I wanted it to look like 'now.' It looks sort of like television."
So what advice does Annie Leibovitz have for budding photographers? "The thing I tell artists now is to make sure they preserve their work. Put it into a book. It doesn't have to be published, but put it into something."
- Annie Leibovitz's newest book is "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005." Her exhibition by the same name runs through September 9th at the High Museum of Art.
(Story: Jordan McAuley, Photos: Matt Burkhalter)
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