?PARA 7PAR@ ` ∩TEXT ` ßLeibovitz, Annie1949╨ photographerBorn Anna-Lou Leibovitz on October 2, 1949, in Westbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz was the daughter of Sam Leibovitz, an Air Force officer, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor who had performed with Martha Graham╒s company. Her family moved frequently from one military base to another when Annie was young. While this fostered closeness among the six Leibovitz children, Annie also developed a shyness she carried with her into her professional life.In 1967 she enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, intending to become a painter. A night class in photography inspired the purchase of her first camera, bought in Japan en route to visit her father, then stationed in the Philippines. She used that camera to document her five months on an Israeli kibbutz and, upon her return, to shoot street scenes of San Francisco in the late 1960s.On the basis of those photos, she was given her first commercial assignment by Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, photographing Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. Following that, at the age of twenty, she was placed on a retainer of $47 a week for the magazine where she worked for the next thirteen years. By 1973 she was chief photographer at Rolling Stone, photographing the expanding counter-cultural music scene, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Les Paul, Bob Dylan, Jerzy Kosinski, John Belushi, Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler, Pat Benatar, Woody Allen, Debbie Harry, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt. In 1975 she was hired by the Rolling Stones to document the group╒s six-month concert tour, during which she produced several famous and frequently published photos of lead singer Mick Jagger, and which introduced her to the high-powered, drug culture surrounding the group. (She later said, ╥It took me about five years to get off that tour.╙) Beginning in1983 she took some time off from the daily pressures of photojournalism. She produced a sixty-print show that toured Europe and the U.S. for the next two years. The accompanying book, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, had sold 85,000 copies by 1990. When she returned to work, it was not to Rolling Stone but to high-gloss Vanity Fair under the editorship of Tina Brown, thereby broadening her range of possible subjects well beyond the world of rock and roll. In 1986 she moved further into advertising photography, working for such clients as Honda, American Express, and the Gap. The American Express ad campaign won particular acclaim for its artistry and a Clio Award in 1987. In the spring of 1991, Leibovitz had her first museum exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., one of only two such exhibits ever devoted to a living photographer by the Portrait Gallery. A companion book, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, was published in October 1991. Her earliest photos were in black-and-white. It was while at Rolling Stone that she developed her trademark vivid primary colors, which, combined with the newsprint surface of the 1970s Rolling Stone, gave her work its most distinctive quality. Continued use of vivid, even garish, colors marked her later work at Vanity Fair and her advertising photographs. In some of her 1990s work she returned to black-and-white.Her modus operandi as a photographer was always to spend large amounts of time with the subjects she photographed, typically spending two days observing every detail of their daily lives. She claimed that she retained her childhood shyness, making her awkward in the presence of strangers. Ironically, this awkwardness, along with an absence of awe in the presence of stars, was what enabled her to form an intimate and relaxed relationship with her subjects and to enlist them in the portrait process. Leibovitz viewed her photographic sessions as ╥a collaboration╙ and insisted it was this arrangement that produced some of her best photographs: Christo swathed in wrapping in cloth, Bette Midler buried in a bed of roses, naked John Lennon wrapped fetus-like around Yoko Ono and Ella Fitzgerald in a red suit standing in front of her 1959 Mercedes convertible. A photographer of celebrities who herself became a celebrity, she asserted ╥I╒m not the people I photograph. It╒s more of a service I perform.╙ styl ` & ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ) !I !I ▐ !I 5¬ !I ï 5¬ î !I █ !I Φ !I Σ !I ≥ !I 5¬ !I ! !I = !I ë !I ù !I ¬ !I ╡ !I
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