Annie Leibovitz
Waterbury, Connecticut (USA) 1949

With a prolific body of work rich in nuance, Annie Leibovitz (b. Waterbury, Connecticut, USA 1949) has established herself as a central figure in contemporary photography, as well as one of the most prominent chroniclers of popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. After studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, photography was the medium in which she found her own distinctive vision. From her early work for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s, she has crafted some of the most iconic images in contemporary visual culture, securing a prominent place in the collective imagination. With portraiture as her preferred medium, Leibovitz’s work reconceives the boundaries between popular and high culture, glamour and vulnerability, and the public and the private.

Despite an initially direct approach, her photography soon became more elaborate and conceptual, besides evolving from analog to digital. Always aware of the ambiguous nature of photographic images, Leibovitz strikes a balance between the staged and the spontaneous. Her work is often painterly, where every detail carries symbolic meaning. An essential feature is controlling environmental aspects to exploit them as discursive elements, though not in terms of subordinating the natural to the artificial, but rather of reexamining the public image of the subject to reveal their inner self. This theatrical staging – drawing in some ways from the Baroque – often exposes the fragility coexisting with the image of power, rather than aggrandizing the subjects she photographs. Her iconic 1980 photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono exemplifies this dynamic: the naked, fetal body of Lennon clinging to the fully clothed and composed Ono reverses traditional power roles and plays with the tension between the intimate and the public. Leibovitz’s work can be seen through the lens of postmodernism, as she employs intertextuality and the appropriation of existing cultural archetypes and codes to subvert established categories.

Her creative process should not be understood solely as a technical feat but rather as a conceptual approach to her subjects. Leibovitz often immerses herself in her subjects’ lives, spending time with them and studying their worlds before releasing the shutter. This drawing nearer to the subject reveals an ethos that values process over the result, with the aim of capturing the unique essence of the persons portrayed. The idea is evident in works such as her 1984 portrait of Whoopi Goldberg, where the image of the actress, submerged in a milk-filled bathtub, highlights both her comedic persona and her racial identity; or in Leibovitz’s 2011 series Pilgrimage, which lingers on places and objects central to American cultural memory. Her role as a documentary photographer is as significant as her status as a celebrity portraitist: her coverage of the Sarajevo conflict in 1993 and photographs of Richard Nixon’s departure by helicopter on the day of his resignation in 1974 are prime examples.

Throughout her career, Leibovitz has worked with major publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including retrospectives at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C., USA, 1991), the Brooklyn Museum (New York, USA, 2007), and the National Portrait Gallery (London, UK, 2009), among others. Her photographs are held in prominent collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA), the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (USA).

Clara Derrac