Annie Leibovitz
Shooting at the Stars

BACK IN 1983, I remember a scene in the art department of A&M records in London. I was there in connection with a then-breaking artiste but the face on the artwork being prepared on the desk was that of Karen Carpenter. Carpenter had recently died while recovering from anorexia nervosa and the conversation had turned to the subject of how she might best be remembered on a posthumously released album cover. Immediately, my mind cast back to an image I remembered of Karen Carpenter from a cover of Rolling Stone circa 1974. Compared to the heavily worked photograph in front of me, the Rolling Stone image contained all of the life-affirming qualities of the Carpenters’ music and more. It would have been an obvious choice for a public wishing to remember Karen Carpenter at her peak, but the record company had other ideas.

The Rolling Stone cover photograph that I had remembered was of course by Annie Leibovitz. Like so many of her covers for the paper, Leibovitz’s image had contributed to the setting of the standard for off-stage rock photography throughout the 1970s. Natural, intimate, straight up portrait photography was always what Leibovitz did best, and some of her best work in that field was for Rolling Stone. Where later generations of rock photographers became known for particular photographs of particular artistes, it is now almost impossible to identify Leibovitz with one particular image because it was always the quality of the photography that got her noticed, rather than who was portrayed (unless one counts her final historically significant image of a naked John Lennon wrapped around Yoko, taken just hours before he was shot dead in 1981). Leibovitz, you see, was never a photographer that you just identified with the coolest performers; hers was a true portraitist’s eye that penetrated to the heart of her human subjects, regardless of whether they were a rising star or an eclipsed icon.

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


Her March 1972 cover for Rolling Stone of Alice Cooper, for example, (taken at the time of the Cooper’s meteoric rise following the defining moment of their third album Love it to Death) was as relevant and shocking at the time as her cover just a couple of months later that depicted a naked David Cassidy. In fact it was probably the Cassidy image that was considered the most controversial of the two, largely because it was an obvious attempt by Cassidy to rid himself of the safe image that had been cultivated for him for his ongoing role in The Partridge Family. What is also striking about the Cassidy photo shoot is Leibovitz’s memory of it too though; ‘I certainly wasn’t thinking that sex sells magazines; I don’t think anyone had that consciousness back then. That was considered pretty vulgar and we just didn’t do that,’ she recalls. A time more innocent, or more principled? Maybe both. Certainly for Rolling Stone it was Leibovitz’s eye as a photographer, rather than her ability to get the stars to disrobe that got her named as the paper’s chief photographer in 1973.

Born Anna-Lou Leibovitz in the industrial city of Waterbury Connecticut in 1949, Leibovitz first studied photography seriously in a night class at San Francisco Art Institute, where Ansel Adams had founded a photography department in 1945. At the time (the late-1960s) Leibovitz was studying painting, but the department that Adams had set up offered the first program of its kind dedicated to exploring photography as a fine art medium. However, it was not until she returned to the USA following a brief sojourn on an Israeli Kibbutz that the professional world of photography really began to open up for her, and it was at Rolling Stone that she first cultivated the sense of herself as a working photographer. ‘I grew with Rolling Stone,’ she says, ‘and I brought a personalised reportage style to my assignments; I wasn’t a music photographer, I wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roll photographer, I was simply a photographer.’ Perhaps, following Leibovitz’s lead then, it was this that most defined the emergence of the Rolling Stone cover as the benchmark in editorial portraiture. Regardless of the performers’ standing in their field, she recalls, what she always had in mind was that she was first and foremost photographing people, and what is striking is how powerful her images of people really are. Here were pictures that spoke across distance, sometimes still strong and powerful when seen on the newsstand from the other side of the street – her portrait of Diana Ross from 1973 being an obvious example of the kind of cover that sold copies of Rolling Stone by the shed load.

'I grew with Rolling Stone,’ she says, ‘and I brought a personalised reportage style to my assignments; I wasn’t a music photographer, I wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roll photographer, I was simply a photographer.'

By the time that the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Tour of the America’s was underway, Leibovitz’s eye was so in demand that she was installed as their official tour photographer and had thrown herself completely into the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, with all its accompanying highs and lows. Warned by her publisher, Jann Wenner, not to go Leibovitz had ignored that good advice to her peril. As she subsequently disclosed in a film made by her sister Barbara, ‘I didn't know what I was getting myself into. It was unbelievably stupid to pick that group of men and that situation to decide to become part of something.’ The idea, she believed then, was that to capture the life you were photographing, you had to immerse yourself into that life entirely, and certainly her 1975 tour-bus baptism led to the development of some extraordinarily intimate portraits again (including those published in a summer 1975 issue of Rolling Stone) but it also led to a struggle with drug addiction that Leibovitz only really overcame when she left the paper to work for Vanity Fair. As she recalls, ‘working at Rolling Stone was a drug culture. Who were my mentors? Hunter Thompson, who was a total maniac, never off drugs. Cocaine propelled you... it made you think you were thinking.’

By the end of her stint with the Stones, Leibovitz was well and truly established as the grand dame of rock photography for sure, but all that was about to change. With the arrival of punk rock a new generation of photographers (many of them also female and inspired by Leibovitz’s trailblazing example) were waiting in the wings to take up the cause themselves. By 1983, Leibovitz herself had already begun to move towards what might be considered a more corporate or refined clientele meanwhile, not just with the styling of her Vanity Fair work but also, more recently, her advertising gigs for Disney Parks (David Beckham on horseback, Scarlett Johansson as Cinderella) Louis Vuitton (Keith Richards again), American Express, Gap, and Givenchy – and of course, today it doesn’t come much more corporate than photographing royalty (Queen Elizabeth II) too. That said, there is another strand to Leibovitz’s output also, best seen in her internationally significant touring exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005. As Leibovitz puts it, ‘I don't have two lives, this is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.’ Consequently the birth of her three daughters or the death of those dear to her (including her companion Susan Sontag and her father also) are all viewed on equal pegging with those memorable images of a pregnant Demi Moore, Nelson Mandela in Soweto, or George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House. Talk to anyone of a certain generation about the work of Annie Leibovitz though, and it’s her work as a rock photographer for Rolling Stone that is best remembered. Ultimately that is the cross that she continues to bear, for it was she who made such a strong contribution to documenting those defining moments as the counter-culture crossed over into the mainstream.

All RS covers reproduced by kind permission of Wenner Media, NYC.

Photoicon is grateful for the generous assistance of Anne Marie Basanese at Wenner Media in the preparation of this essay.


Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005
Maison Européenne de Photographie Paris
18th June – 14th September 2008
National Portrait Gallery, London 16th October – 25th January 2009

The European Tour of Leibovitz’s extensive personal archive comes to London from Paris hot on the heels of the NPG’s blockbuster Vanity Fair Portraits exhibition and is already the hot ticket of the autumn season. The photographer has already laid down the rule that her private work should receive equal billing to her commercial assignments but, as a consummate artist, this will pose no problem to the photo press at least - some of her strongest and most intimate imagery has been produced for her private portfolio.