The Many Faces of Life: Annie Leibovitz’s Inner Reflection by Loved Ones

Annie Leibovitz, Jewish photographer, born October 2, 1949,  is best known for her iconic celebrity portraits which capture the naked inner truth about her subjects.2 Growing up Jewish during the Civil Rights movement and moving from military base to military base, Leibovitz saw the country as an outsider. Thus, she became enamored with finding the “guts of a photograph”1 and connecting with her subject’s reality.

In addition to wanting to capture the truth in her environment, she was also heavily influenced by the hippie culture she was surrounded by, as well as her mother’s interest in dance and art. This interweaving of art and honesty, which comprises her own life, bleeds into her photography and has developed a new age of commercial photography: a connection between the photographer and the subject. In this image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono 1, Leibovitz is able to capture the raw adoration between the two during a photo shoot with Rolling Stone. Leibovitz staged the photo to tell her subject’s story while merging the emotions of the two with art.

This theme of converging the essence of herself, her subject,and her work prevails and eventually leads her to create the photo book, “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005”. She characterizes the images as the collage within herself. The book is her story.  It’s a compilation of well known celebrities and her cherished loved ones and documents the good and bad parts of a person’s life. Leibovitz put it together after her lover, Susan Sontag 2 [Pictured to the left], died from Leukemia and, although critics say not all of the photos are as skillfully composed as a photographer of her caliber is capable of, it is unanimous that this book delivers a beautiful insight into her life.3

Her story, like many others, features love, tragedy, and enjoyment of the simple things. Although her celebrity portraits are brilliantly composed and match the image of the celebrity to the celebrity’s personal life, what shines about this book is the connection between Leibovitz and the images of her family. These people constructs what she loves about life, and after Sontag and her father died, the book is a way of commemorating them and understanding her emotions towards their loss.

Each image is an honest representation of the subject in the portrait as well as an honest representation of Leibovitz herself. This honestly is what makes her images so striking to the viewer across time. All human life is stricken with pure happiness, grief, anger, and contentment. In capturing her own life, she effectively creates a connection that spans over religion, politics, and socioeconomic status. She depicts human nature itself, regardless of the viewers’ difference from herself. Over the next few weeks, I intend to document my own story of life and gain a better understanding of the woman behind the camera.

 

 

 

“Somewhere in the raw material of information about who the main subject is and what they do, is the nucleus of what the picture will become. It doesn’t have to be a big idea. It can be simple. The key thing about a conceptual portrait is its connection to the subject”

-Annie Leibovitz, MasterClass 2019

As Leibovitz stated for MasterClass, the star of her photographs is truly the subject 4 The subject will decide the photo, the photographer’s job is to capture the photo once it is decided. This is Leibovitz’s model, and I used this same model while I built my own memoir of photographs. I intended to mostly capture my subjects in their natural habitat where they were most comfortable and were most likely to create moments that tell their own story. Luckily for me, my camera was always with me in the form of my phone, ready to capture the photos my family decided for me during my daily interactions with them.

In addition to waiting for the moment her subject chooses to display their natural self, whether in a studio or in their own home, Leibovitz also utilizes tricks to her subject’s moment more astonishing. Similar to many photographers, she makes an effort to emulate natural light, especially in her black and white film photography. However, unlike most, she prefers the light of the morning when the light is soft and she has more time with her subject. In my project, I tried to also emulate natural light through black and white digital photography, whether I actually took the photo in natural light or by using photo editing.

The biggest challenge was to feel the moment and snap images that spoke as much about the nature of my subject as they did about me. Pictured to the left, Leibovitz managed to capture the happiness of her parents and her nephew while also showing her love for them 2. In a similar manner, my goal was to document my own life story as Leibovitz did in her “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005”. In this photo book, Leibovitz worked to understand her own feelings about the ups and downs in her life while staying true to her subject. Similarly, I attempted to take photographs that spoke to my feelings about the people around me while photographing their essence in an effort to understand Leibovitz and myself more in the process.

I wasn’t able to emulate every aspect of Leibovitz’s memoir. I found that unlike Leibovitz, I was incapable of photographing the extreme low points in life. For me, I can’t work through grief and other sad emotions by memorializing those moments. However, her photo book is her memoir and mostly reflects her feelings on her subjects in their environment, so I focused on my daily interactions with my family in an effort to describe myself as well as to describe who my family is and what I adore about them.

 

Having a camera does not make one a photographer, I discovered after attempting to encapsulate the feeling of a moment into a non-moving photograph. When looking for photos to take, I found that there are millions of photos possible because there are millions of moments in a day. The difficulty is sorting through those potential pictures for the pictures that really matter.

“When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.”

                                                                                                                         -Annie Leibovitz

You begin with a moment. It could be a moment that occurs on a daily basis, but it’s a moment that pulls your heart. I found that the best moments were scenes I had seen everyday. Similar to Leibovitz, I took photos of my daily reality, and due to the recent COV-19 pandemic, my current reality is trying to stay positive at home.

There are no extravagant parties or beautiful celebrities that grace my life on a regular basis in they way they do for Leibovitz. However, similar to Leibovitz, in my photo book memoir, the real stars are my real people. Life changes, but the way I feel about my family and friends doesn’t. Even though I took these photos recently, they’ve been present my whole life. Looking through the eyes of Leibovitz, the moments were not difficult to find, the difficulty was capturing a piece of the moment.

“I’ve been more interested in examining where these ideas of right- and wrong- looking things/moments come from and in forcing upon myself recognition that the ‘right’ looks come from more than the convergence of beautiful lighting and strong arrangements of shape and form”

                                                                                    -Joanne Leonard, The Familial Gaze 6

The featured photo above may not have been ‘right’ in terms of exact composition, but in terms of comfort, this photo is perfect. Leibovitz did not need to stage her personal life and as a result, her photos have a natural connection to the subject in her photos. This image of my companion imitates the image Leibovitz took of her lover, Susan Sontag 2 (image to the right). Taken in natural lighting, I attempted to convey as much of Leibovitz’s style into my own feelings on my subject.

Although I used the natural lighting and natural moments, many of my photos missed the exact feeling I was trying to capture. They did catch a glimpse of my intentions, but I found it challenging to fully encompass all of the warmth of the moments. This process of trying to tell the story of my life through my people, like Leibovitz, leaves me wondering what photos did Leibovitz take that didn’t tell her whole story? Does this image of Sontag fail in ensnaring all the emotions Leibovitz felt when she took the photo?

Leibovitz had many photos, but very few clusters of the same photo. In the numerous images, she tried to extract all of what made her Annie Leibovitz, and it seems that in the sheer number of photos, she captured the people who made her. She isolated everything she could to make her photos meaningful.

Leibovitz always has an effortless portrait composition, and I discovered the black and white photographs sift out the distracting pull of irrelevant emotions. The focus can then be on the subject themself and the emotion created by the image.

“I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity”

-Annie Leibovitz

No photo is objective and the issue is the balance of your truth and the subject’s willingness to allow you to display your truth. Even though Leibovitz claims that her photos are focused on the essence of her subjects, her photo book, “A Photographer’s Life”, focuses on her feelings of her subjects rather than just the subject’s opinions on themselves. Her own truth of her reality is displayed and I attempted to mimic the capturing of my emotions about my subjects. It was difficult to wait for the right moment. It felt awkward holding up my camera waiting for my subject to not only show themself, but for them to show me what they mean to me without fully knowing what they mean to me.

In the image above, I photographed my mom. My mother was a difficult subject. She was very willing to be photographed, but she wanted photos that showed what she feels about herself, not understanding that my goal was to photograph what I feel about her. It took many photos and lots of jokes for her to give me what I needed, and although I had thought about asking her to do certain poses to try to get the photo I wanted, I realized that that wouldn’t have worked. Leibovitz displays that the photo does not choose the moment, the moment chooses the photo.

What was surprising was how often the image of the instance perfectly described what I wanted to convey. It was extraordinary to focus and recognize the fact that what a person does everyday is what makes them special. People are a composition of moments that can’t be captured in words, and after taking these photographs in the style of Annie Leibovitz, I understand why her memoir was pictured and not penned.

 

 

Gallery:

 

Slideshow 1:[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”128″ gal_title=”All images”]

(I tried making a slideshow, but I couldn’t get it to work)

Slideshow 2, Leibovitz’s photographs (And one of Sontag’s photos since Leibovitz seemed to view her lover as an extension of herself):

 

My goal for this project was to understand myself and Annie Leibovitz better. What I found was that Leibovitz is an extraordinarily strong woman. She celebrated life, good or bad, with images. It is extremely difficult to deal with and be strong enough to document all that life offers but Leibovitz does. After dealing with the grief of losing a loved one, I found that I did not have that same fortitude. Taking photos was Leibovitz’s way to show her respect and devotion to that person, but for me, it was more respectful and more representative of their essence to only keep the photos that captured their soul, not an empty body or the sadness of the people they left behind. To the left is an image of my family dog, Lea. She passed away recently and this photograph will always remember one of the many happy moments her life was filled with rather than the sadder ending she left with.

Moments and emotions stretch across time and photographers have been using photography to commemorate life and shared moments for years. These moments make up the universal connection between people and the photographs of those moments preserve this commonality while showing us how far we’ve come. The 20th century is where photos really became commonplace and as a result, we can see where we started a century ago and look forward to where we will go.

Annie Leibovitz is honest about herself and her environment and she is right about the moments picking themselves. They capture who we are in the moment, and I’ve learned so much about myself and my family by just paying attention to what’s been there the whole time. These family members, and the many others who are not depicted here, define my life, good and bad. This assignment showed me that photographs celebrate life and are a way to understand how we view the world and how we are able to deal with that view.

 

Text:

1.  http://www.artnet.com/artists/annie-leibovitz/
2. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/annie-leibovitz-life-through-a-lens/16/
3. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Love-family-celebrity-grief-Leibovitz-puts-2548168.php#photo-2644890
4. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/8-essential-photography-tips-from-annie-leibovitz
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZxOvNxbi7U
6. Hirsch, M. (1999). The familial gaze. Hanover, NH ; London: University Press of New England.

Images:

1. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-annie-leibovitz-perfectly-captured-yoko-johns-relationship
2. Leibovitz, Annie. A Photographer’s Life. Print

 

Sources: List of all your sources with hyperlinks. Be sure to separate photo sources from written research sources.