Annie Leibovitz at Work, by Annie Leibovitz, edited from conversations with Sharon DeLano
When Annie Leibovitz started out as a photographer in 1968 her heroes were Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ turned out to be the antithesis of the celebrity portraits that have defined her career — not only posed but contrived and stagey. Her recent picture of the Queen standing against dark trees is faked up, with the trees taken the day before, and the figure added digitally. ‘You set the stage for them,’ she says of her subjects. ‘It’s studied. A kind of performance art.’
The other hero, Robert Frank, by driving across America in the mid-1950s, composed a narrative portrait of the Americans at one moment in their history. The strand of history recorded by Annie Leibovitz, from her days on Rolling Stone almost 40 years ago, and notably through her work for Vanity Fair, is spun chiefly from pop culture and celebrity.
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