Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005.

January 22, 2007

The most personal work of Anne Leibovitz, A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 (book here), mixing assignment portraits of celebrities with images of her personal life, including images of her family and her partner Susan Sontag, will be exhibited in the “San Diego Museum of Art” in Balboa Park, from February 10th to April 22nd, 2007.

"This show came out of a moment of grief ... discovering these images was like going on an archaeological dig. The family pictures meant so much more to me than the assignment work in that moment."

"I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it."

“With Susan it was a love story. With my parents it was the relationship of a lifetime. And with my children it’s the future. I just tried to create an honest work that had all those things in it.”- Annie Leibovitz

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I can’t wait to see the images. The show just closed today at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and will be moving to San Diego in the coming week. You can hear a recording of the introduction of the show at the Brooklyn Museum with Annie here and an NPR audio interview by Michele Norris here. The New York Times published an assay about the exhibit and there you can see few images.

Somewhere at the back of our closets, in shoe boxes or plastic bins, we all have stacks of these snapshots: pale thighs and juice boxes and striped umbrellas on a sandy beach; a rumpled bed and a view from an anonymous window; poses by the lake at a cousin's wedding, candids out of focus or ill-framed. Even as we shoot them, most are forgotten -- and as anyone who's suffered through someone else's endless slide show knows, that's usually for the best. Photographs are great hyperbolists, capable of convincing us that, with the simple push of a button, a mundane moment is something worth memorializing. Still, even the most obsessive shutterbugs usually know that the only people who care about these images are those who lived the captured moments or loved the people who did.- Sarah Karnasiewicz from salon.com

It is not easy to find many galleries of Annie's work online but I found some images of the series Women, and American Music. I also found a couple on candid interviews with the artist: fotoTAPETA and Powells.com.

Miguel Garcia-Guzman

Posted in Books, Photographers, Photography