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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5985 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-18
• Released on: 2008-11-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375505102
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."
—Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

Amazon Exclusive Essay: Annie Leibovitz on Photography

In 1977, when Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, asked me to prepare a fifty-page portfolio of my pictures for the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine, I decided not to simply make a selection of photographs that had been published. I looked at everything I had done since I started working. It was a revelation. For one thing, I had no idea that I had accumulated so many photographs. You lose track of them when you’re working every day. And you see the work in a different way when you look at it from the distance of time. You get a sense of where you are going. You start to see a life.

I had the opportunity to edit my work most thoroughly when I prepared two retrospective books, Annie Leibovitz: 1970–1990 and A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005. It was thrilling to see that first book laid out chronologically. To see the pictures historically. The second book, A Photographer’s Life, was assembled immediately after the death of Susan Sontag and my father. Editing the book took me through the grieving process.

The books are pure. They are mine. The magazines I work for don’t belong to me. It’s the editor’s magazine, and the editor has every right to use the material the way he or she wants to. It isn’t just that art directors and editors at magazines make selections that I wouldn’t necessarily make. Which they sometimes do. Or that they run pictures too small. Or that they put so much type on the pictures that you can’t see them anymore. Magazines have quite specific needs. It’s a collaboration only so far, which is true of almost all assignment work.

When I began working on my new book, I thought it would be a pamphlet of maybe forty pages or so. I intended to take ten of my photographs and dissect them. They didn’t have to be my most famous pictures, just pictures that I cared about. But as I began going through the material I realized that I might as well be more ambitious. I started to think that I would try to answer every single question anyone has ever asked about how my work is done. To defuse the mystery, and the misconceptions. To explain that it’s nothing more than work. And learning how to see.

So my forty-page pamphlet became a 240-page book with over a hundred photographs in it. It is written for someone like the person I was at the beginning of my career, when I was in art school. A young me. I didn’t know which road I would take. Whether it would be a commercial road, a magazine road, an artistic road, a journalistic road. It’s written for that person. Someone who is interested in photography but isn’t sure how they want to use it.

The book is more emotional than I had imagined it would be. But, most importantly, it is my edit. No one is going to care about, or understand, your work the way you do, and if you are going to explain it you have to be able to present it the way you want to. That’s what a book can do better than any other medium.

See Annie Leibovitz's 15 favorite photography books.

(Photo credit Paul Gilmore)

About the Author
Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a career officer in the Air Force and her childhood was spent on a succession of military bases. While studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute she took night classes in photography, and in 1970 she began working for Rolling Stone magazine. She became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973. By the time she left the magazine, ten years later, she had shot one hundred and forty-two covers and published photo essays on scores of stories, including her memorable accounts of the resignation of Richard Nixon and of the 1975 Rolling Stones tour. She joined the staff of Vanity Fair in 1983 and in 1993 also began working for Vogue. In addition to her magazine editorial work, Leibovitz has created influential advertising campaigns for American Express, the Gap, the Milk Board, and Louis Vuitton. She has worked with many arts organizations, including American Ballet Theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Mark Morris Dance Group, and with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Her books include Annie Leibovitz: Photographs (1983), Photographs: Annie Leibovitz, 1970—1990 (1991), Olympic Portraits (1996), Women (1999), American Music (2003), and A Photographer’s Life (2006). Exhibitions of her work have appeared in museums and galleries all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Leibovitz has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress and is the recipient of many other honors including the Barnard College Medal of Distinction and the Infinity Award in Applied Photography from the International Center of Photography. She was decorated a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. She lives in New York with her three children, Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE

When I was young and just starting out as a photographer, I worked for Rolling Stone, which was then a small magazine published in San Francisco. It was devoted mostly to rock and roll. I didn’t actually know much about rock and roll, but I was grateful to be able to take pictures and see them published. It didn’t matter what the subject was. What mattered was photography. Being a photographer was my life. I took pictures all the time, and pretty much everything I photographed seemed interesting. Every single time I went out to take a picture was different. The circumstances were different. The place was different. The dynamics were different. Every single time. You never knew what was going to unfold.

Years before it ever occurred to me that one could have a life as a photographer, I had become accustomed to looking at the world through a frame. The frame was the window of our family’s car as we traveled from one military base to another. My father was a career Air Force officer, and whenever he was transferred, which was often, our family of six kids would pile in the back of the station wagon and my mom and dad would just drive, nonstop. We didn’t have any money, so motels were pretty much out of the question. I remember driving from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Fort Worth, Texas. Our luggage was piled on top of the station wagon, and a set of moose antlers was in front of the luggage. We stopped only once, in Anaheim, to see Disneyland. The Disneyland people let us park right in front of the entrance.

I was a third-year student at the San Francisco Art Institute when my pictures began appearing in Rolling Stone. I had enrolled there as a painting major in the fall of 1967. My father was by then stationed in the Philippines, at Clark Air Base, the largest American military base overseas. It was the main support base for soldiers coming in and out of Vietnam. During the summer after my freshman year, while I was staying with my family at the base, I visited Japan with my mother and some of my brothers and sisters.
I bought my first real camera in Japan, a Minolta SR-T 101. The first thing I did with it was take it on a climb up Mt. Fuji.

Climbing Mt. Fuji is something every Japanese does at some point, but it’s harder than you might think. I was young, and I started up the mountain fast. I didn’t know about pacing. My brother Phil was even younger–he was thirteen–and he ran ahead of me. Phil disappeared. The camera felt like it weighed a ton. It was awkward. It got heavier the higher we went. After a while I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it, but just then a group of elderly Japanese women in dark robes came marching along in single file. They were chanting in an encouraging way and I fell in behind them. We passed Phil at the seventh way station. He was lying flat on his back.

When you climb Mt. Fuji you stay overnight at the eighth way station and get up in the morning so that you can reach the top at sunrise. It’s a glorious moment. Spiritually significant. When I got to the top I realized that the only film I had was the roll in the camera. I hadn’t thought much about the film situation. I photographed the sunrise with the two or three frames I had left.

I took this, my first experience with a camera on the road, or path, as a lesson in determination and moderation, although it would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There weren’t going to be any pictures without it.

That summer, I took pictures around the base and developed the film in the base hobby shop. When I went back to the San Francisco Art Institute I signed up for a night class in photography. The following summer, I took a photography workshop, and that’s when I decided that this was what I wanted to do. Photography suited me. I was a young and unformed person and I was impatient. Photography seemed like a faster medium than painting. Painting was isolating. Photography took me outside and helped socialize me. I felt at home in the rooms where the photography students worked. There were a lot of angry abstract expressionists in the painting studios. I wasn’t ready for abstraction. I wanted reality.

We were taught that the most important thing a young photographer can do is learn how to see. It wasn’t about the equipment we were using. I don’t remember being taught any technique. A camera was only a box that recorded an image. We learned to compose, to frame, to fill the negative, to fit everything we saw into the camera’s rectangle. We were never to crop our pictures. We went out every morning and took pictures and developed them in the darkroom the same day. Since the prints were washed in communal trays and everybody’s pictures were lying there with everybody else’s, you tried hard to come back with something good. In the evening we would sit around and discuss our work. We were a community of artists.

Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank were our heroes. The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson had just been published, and I remember looking at that book and realizing what it meant to be a photographer. The camera gave you a license to go out alone into the world with a purpose. Robert Frank was probably the most influential figure among the photography students. A new edition of The Americans had also just been published, and I fell in love with the idea of working like Robert Frank. Driving around in a car and taking pictures. Looking for stories. Danny Lyon’s book about motorcycle gangs, The Bikeriders, was another important book at the time. Lyon was not much older than we were and he had lived with the bikers he photographed, gotten close to them. It was this style of personal reportage, shot in black and white with a 35mm camera, that we adopted.

In retrospect, there are two photographs that represent the way I wanted to work–the romance of the process. One is the last photograph in The Americans. Robert Frank’s wife and two small children are in the front seat of their car. It’s dawn. They’re parked across from a truck stop in Texas. You can imagine that they’ve been driving all night. The picture is from one of the trips Frank took across the United States, making a record of the country as if, as he put it, he were someone who was seeing it for the first time. The other photograph is a picture of Irving Penn’s portable natural-light studio. It was taken by his assistant in 1967 on a desolate plain in Nepal. The studio is a big rectangular tent partially supported by ropes pegged into the ground. Penn’s truck is parked in back of it. This was the studio Penn took on his expeditions to remote places. He used it to photograph the Mud Men of New Guinea and the Quechua Indians in the Andes and tribesmen in Morocco.

In the fall of 1969, I took my camera with me to Israel, where I worked on a kibbutz and studied Hebrew. I thought about staying there. The Vietnam War was at its height, and it was a confusing time to be a young American. It seemed particularly confusing to me, personally. I was a member of the generation that was most vocally opposed to the war, and yet I felt that I should be loyal to my father, who was going in and out of Vietnam on missions. It became apparent pretty soon, however, that becoming an expatriate wasn’t going to solve anything. I had a home and a country. At the beginning of the year I went back to the San Francisco Art Institute and began printing my pictures from Israel in the school darkroom and going out every morning to take more pictures.

The scale and violence of the protests against the war had increased while I was away. In the spring of 1970, students went on strike to protest the invasion of Cambodia. The ROTC building at Kent State University in Ohio was burned down, and National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of students, killing four of them. I had taken pictures of antiwar rallies in San Francisco and Berkeley, and my boyfriend persuaded me to take them to the art director of Rolling Stone, along with my pictures from Israel. One of the pictures of a demonstration at City Hall was used for the cover of a special issue of the magazine devoted to campus riots and protests. It was the beginning of my career. Seeing that image on the newsstand is a moment that will stay with me forever.

By the summer between my junior and senior years at the art institute I had traded my Minolta in for a Nikon, the camera of choice for professional photographers in the late sixties and early seventies. The Nikon had a really sharp 35mm lens. A free-flowing, beautiful lens. During the early years at the magazine, when I thought of myself more as a photojournalist than a portraitist, I usually carried three cameras on assignments. I didn’t want to lose time changing lenses. I would take a 35mm lens, a 55, and a 105. A 35mm lens provides a perspective close to what the human eye sees, and it was my lens of choice. The 55 was considered a “normal” lens, very classic, simple, and noninterfering. The 105 was on a body with a meter and I could use it for light readings. Zoom lenses were not really an option then. They weren’t made very well. When you saw a photographer with a zoom lens on his camera you didn’t take him seriously.

In the early years at Rolling Stone, the art department thought nothing of cropping photographs or cutting them up and making collages. Or running them very small. The editors were more interested in the text than in pictures. I took it almost as a personal triumph in 1976 when the magazine devoted a whole issue to Richard Avedon’s portraits of people he considered to be at the center of power in America. They had asked Avedon to cover the presidential elections that year–Jimmy ...

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Customer Reviews

The mind of the artist
I bought this book because as a small travel publisher I have quite a library of photography books, and I thought this would be a unique addition.

I was right, but it's not what I expected.

A better title would be "Annie Leibovitz: On Work."

This is not a coffee table book, and it's not mainly photographs. For each image there's at least a full page of editorial, maybe two or three pages, as the author describes how each shot came about and her thoughts about the experience. The book is smaller than you might think--a little shorter and narrower than a Time magazine--and the photos smaller than you'd expect. Few are larger than a postcard.

There's no dust jacket, just a paper band that wraps around the bottom.

I was expecting the book to include technical shot-by-shot details, with background images showing reflectors, stylists and such. No such luck. Leibovitz does, however, include an insightful essay about the equipment she has used over the years, as well as an FAQ list. "What advice do you have for a photographer that's just starting out?" "Stay close to home." (She goes on to elaborate.)

The stories, though, are interesting, much like those in A Camera, Two Kids, and a Camel. Because Leibovitz has such a clean writing style, and her subjects are often celebrities, the book is a pleasant read, and every bit the unique addition to my library I was hoping for. Now that I've spent some time with it, I actually prefer that the book isn't bigger; it's much easier to sit back and spend time with it this way.

Getting back to the images, some of them really stayed with me. Besides the famous shot of Demi Moore that became a cover of Vanity Fair, there's another one, straight on, with the top of the naked actress fully exposed. A shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger on a white stallion looks like something from Herbert List. A simple portrait of Patti Smith has the revealing facial details and expression like the best work of Richard Avedon. Then there's a 1980s photo of Rev. Al Sharpton getting his hair done at a beauty salon. Made me laugh out loud.

I know many of these shots have been published before, but it is interesting to be able to flip from one to the other.

Here's the chapter list:

1. Nixon's Resignation
2. The Rolling Stones
3. John and Yoko
4. Conceptual Pictures
5. Advertising
6. Al Sharpton
7. Arnold Schwarzenegger
8. Dance
9. Demi Moore
10. Performance
11. Peak Performance
12. War
13. O.J. Simpson
14. Impromptu
15. Patti Smith
16. Fashion
17. Nudes
18. Groups
19. Presence and Charisma
20. Being There
21. My Mother
22. Sarah
23. Susan
24. Hollywood
25. The Queen
26. The Process
27. The Road West
28. Equipment
29. Ten Most-Asked Questions
30. Publishing History

The stories behind the shots
"At Work" provides a wonderful overview of Annie Leibovitz's career. And what a career it has been -- she's been on the road with the Rolling Stones, she's photographed the Queen of England, the list goes on and on.

Unlike many photo/text books, this is not a how-to book. Sure, there is information on the equipment used for particular shoots, etc. That's not at all what "At Work" is about, though. Instead, it seems to be more about Ms. Leibovitz's progression as an artist. She shares the difficulties, occassional insecurities and successes she's had throughout the years.

Rather than a behind-the-scenes look at the technical side of photography, "At Work" is (in my mind, at least) a behind-the-scenes examination of Ms. Leibovitz's growth as a photographer. And, while the photos are wonderful, they are not necessarily the book's focus -- they illustrate the book's stories.

"At Work" is a quick read that I'm guessing I'll return to several times. I really appreciate that Ms. Leibovitz has shared the human side of high-end photography. Her journey certainly has been worth reading about, and it makes for a fantastic read.

A terrific introduction to the art and reflections of Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz is a well-known photographer. The first time I came to know of her was her work with "Rolling Stone" in the early 1970s. Later, she did photography for "Vanity Fair" and Vogue." This is an interesting volume. It is not a simple compilation of her photos, a coffee table book. The photos normally have a brief essay surrounding the pictures. Of her time at "Rolling Stone," as her career began, she observes (Page 11): "Being a photographer was my life. I took pictures all the time, and pretty much everything I photographed seemed interesting."

The heart of the book is photographs surrounded by her prose. One illustration is when she was designated the tour photographer for the Rolling Stoners' 1975 tour (I saw the group twice in Buffalo, NY that year--once indoors and once outdoors; what a trip!), although she also shows photos from 1977 (Catch Keith Richards lying down or with his son Marlon). She shows us several photos to give a sense of the tour. One of my favorites is Mick Jagger jumping into the air (see page 32). But it is her observations that make this an especially interesting part of the book, as she provides context for the photos.

Another interesting pair of photographs look at the singer Patti Smith. One photo was taken in 1978 and took place in a very hot room, with the singer sweating profusely (page 123); the other was taken about two decades later after the death of Smith's husband. Both photos capture something telling about the singer, just as the prose adds its own part to telling the story.

There are photos of Leibovitz' family, telling us something about the photographer as well as her family. On page 171, there are just four lines of her words to go with a photo of Susan Sontag, but those few lines are, for me, powerful. Another fascinating part of the book is several views of Queen Elizabeth II. The photos seem to provider a sense of this monarch that go beyond just a representation. And the prose in which the photos are embedded also add to the story. In a sense, as with other sections of this book, the prose and photos have a kind of synergistic relationship (obviously, I like the book by saying this!). The section called "The Road West" has two evocative images from Monument Valley that are most affecting. Other segments of interest: John and Yoko, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Hollywood.

This is a well done volume, wedding some exquisite photographs with the artist's reflections. The two go together well, making this a pretty compelling work.