THIS WEEK’S MUSE
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”
Annie Leibovitz is an American photographer, best known for her engaging, dramatic, often quirky portraits, particularly of celebrities.
Born in 1949 in Waterbury, a small town on the Naugatuck River in Connecticut, Leibovitz’s passion for art came as a young girl from her dancer mother’s love of music and painting. Intending to become an art teacher, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960s.
That changed on a trip to Asia to visit her father, stationed at a US Air Force base in The Philippines. She bought her first camera and took her first photographs while climbing Mont Fuji with her mother. She was instantly hooked.
“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 wanted reality.”
Her career path was immediately revised. On returning home she signed up for photography classes and workshops and threw herself into the new artform. Her drive and ambition were quick to reward. In 1970, she began working as a commercial photographer at Rolling Stone magazine, soon became their first female chief photographer. She moved onto Vanity Fair and later Vogue.
Leibovitz’s early style, of subtle and somber images, had dropped away, for a radical new approach that has made her name. A very controlled eye, a detailed ‘storytelling’ angle, and a singular skill at coaxing unexpected behavior from her subjects. “You don’t have to sort of enhance reality, she said. “There is nothing stranger than truth.” Her ability to capture each person’s unique personality lays aa the heart of her best-known work.
“We were taught that the most important thing a young photographer can do is learn how to see. It wasn’t about 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.”
Annie Leibovitz is master at capturing popular culture icons in dramatic, innovative, and memorable ways. She has paved the way for contemporary commercial photography to be seen as legitimate works of art, building on the earlier work—in ability, not style—of Robert Mapplethorpe. She lives and works in New York, and continues to push the limits of her art.
“Photography is actually a wonderful medium for a young person to just go out and discover themselves and discover the world around them. It gives them permission to go out and have a purpose and observe.”
HAPPPENING
MAKERSPACE
September 6, 7, and 8, from 9am–noon
Creating a Shaker Foot Stool
With Jim Meehan and Marc Sitkin
Discover new techniques with hand and machine tools!
$171 – Member, $189 – Non-Member
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