InsideOut: Interview with Annie Leibovitz

by Owen Lipstein January/February 2009



Hudson Valley resident Annie Leibovitz has just published Annie Leibovitz at Work (Random House, 2008), an overview of her career and an account of how some of her most famous photographs were made. In describing how the book came together, she gave us a charming and frank view of her life behind the camera.

InsideOut: What was the guiding motivation for your most recent book?



Annie Leibovitz: I’ve always wanted to do a small book on the making of photographs. Literally, I told Random House that it was part of my book contract. It was going to be a 40-page book, like a pamphlet. I didn’t want them to get too excited about anything. I was going to pick 10 pictures—it wasn’t necessarily going to be the most famous pictures, but just a selection of pictures that had good stories or ideas behind them. And then when I finally sat down to actually do this, I realized there was much more to say, and it turned into 240 pages and 100 photographs.
Some of them are the most famous. I decided (especially after what happened with the queen a couple of summers ago) to just answer every single question anyone’s ever had about the work— to try to dispel all the mystery around it and explain that it’s just work.
So I sat down with Sharon Delano, the editor. She was a New Yorker editor, and I’d worked with her on A Photographer’s Life. As we sat down and started to talk about the making of the photographs, much more came out and it got to be much more
interesting—and hence, this much-larger little volume, [in] which I still was trying to hold onto the idea that it was more like a little primer, a little textbook about the making of the pictures.



IO: You’ve included this wild picture of Mick Jagger in Philadelphia, seemingly flying above the stage. Can you describe going on tour with the Rolling Stones, and how you get this kind of shot?



AL: Going on tour with the Rolling Stones happened very early in my work, in 1975, when I was still working at Rolling Stone magazine. In fact, [co-founder and publisher] Jann Wenner didn’t guarantee me that there’d be a job for me when I finished the tour. He wasn’t too sure he was going to let me come back.



IO: But you went anyway.



AL: He didn’t want me to go on the tour. It was too tempting, with Robert Frank having done the 1972 tour. It just seemed like it was too great of an adventure. I really didn’t understand how music was made, and wanted to give it a chance. (If Robert Frank did it, I wanted to try to do it. I went, of course, to the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied Robert Frank and [Henri] Cartier-Bresson. Personalized 35 mm photography was what I was interested in.)
It’s really, again, a story about being on the road with a band of men and how important it is, no matter what you’re doing, that you hold onto a piece of yourself, that you don’t give yourself entirely away or lose yourself entirely.
At that time, I was so young I thought the best way to get pictures was to throw yourself into what you’re doing and become one with it. Of course it was a little silly to think about doing that with this band of guys. But it’s the best work I did with musicians during that whole tenure with Rolling Stone magazine—over 13 years—because I did spend so much time, and was totally immersed in it. It’s a little story about trying to hold onto a bit of yourself.



IO: You write that at the end of each performance, there’d be this rush of people and you’d literally have to go with the crowd. What was it like being separate, yet also a part of that kind of frenetic flow?



AL: I talk a little bit about learning about power on the tour, and a little bit about the audience and how we let ourselves be melted down to a frenzied mess or mass. There’s lots of things that I learned there.



IO: For all your professional life—at least with many of the photographs—you’ve been surrounded by these so-called very important people. Does that demystify them?



AL: I think, early on, I always understood that they had their lives and I had mine. When I was young, living in San Francisco, I did know Jerry Garcia, because he lived across the bay. It was my town. I knew some of these people a little bit, but it’s not like I had breakfast or lunch with them or something. It was more of a lifestyle at that time, in the early ’70s.
But as my work continued, it became very clear to me that [it was] my work. Even in the Rolling Stones tour, I talk about [how] my interest is taking photographs.
In all of this work, over all these years, when people start to talk to me about the celebrity involved, I try to steer it back to photography, because it’s been my main interest and it probably is what keeps my head on straight. I’m interested in getting a really good photograph, and this little book is about going into portrait work, or any kind of work like what I’m doing. My journey was to build my photography, and [the book is about] how my photography came about.
It’s also about how much latitude there is in this medium. Having worked almost 40 years in [it], you see all these different ways to use it, and how exciting that is, especially now, going into digital.



IO: There’s a delightful story about the whited out picture of Meryl Streep.



AL: You’re dipping into the conceptual, which is really interesting. It’s the beginning of the set-up pictures. That came out of doing those covers for Rolling Stone. Literally, my assignments were turning into appointments, and I found my subjects saying to me, “Well, what do you want me to do?”
I had to start thinking of ways to take pictures that could be done in a short amount of time in one place. Hence, the beginning of this conceptual work.
But Meryl Streep—that particular one is a part of a series of pictures from the late ’70s, early ’80s, that was the high point of the conceptual work. She’d never been too comfortable having her picture taken. (A lot of really good actors who work in film are uncomfortable having a still picture taken. They like to move; they don’t like to stop. She and Robert DeNiro are those kinds of actors: They like to be a character.)
This particular time that we were working together, I knew she wasn’t too happy about sitting for the picture and I said, “Well, what if we did ‘mimeface’ and whiteface?” And she loved that idea. She just got a chance to play. I think I explained that it was a leftover idea from when I was supposed to be photographing James Taylor and it didn’t happen. So she put on the whiteface and it was her idea to pull her face apart like a mask. There it was.



IO: A reader learning about this from your book might be struck by the somewhat improvisational process of trying to get a picture of Streep—who she really was—and then being able to use a crazy idea that obviously worked magnificently for everybody.



AL: She likes to play. She was in a public theater show of “Alice in Wonderland” that I happened to see. She really loved stage work. Of course, we see this now coming out more and more in things like “Mamma Mia,” and also the Carrie Fisher film that she did, “Postcards from the Edge.” She has a real comedic side to her.



IO: You really understood that. On the other side of the spectrum, you have this really entertaining chapter about people who seem to be comfortable with pictures. It’s very interesting to read about Arnold Schwarzenegger, his sense of his own body, and your experience taking pictures of him through the years, including on the famous horse.



AL: It’s a chapter about having worked for almost 40 years [with the same] people; we’ve been around [at] the same time. Patti Smith is very much like that, too. What’s nice about those two pictures in the Patti Smith chapter is that those pictures are almost 20 years apart.
It’s interesting to see [Schwarzenegger] over these years, at different stages. I was there at the beginning. I was in South Africa when they were making the movie “Pumping Iron.” He was competing for [the body-building title of] Mr. Olympia, so there are pictures from that period, and then going to the time when I was doing the [Vanity Fair] “Hall of Fame” [issue in 1988], and he’s posed on his horse. It’s a very graphic picture. He brought his horse along. It’s a very formal, graphic image.
Now he’s the governor of California, as we all know, but this series ends with him in Sun Valley: He’s on top of a mountain. We were going to take his shirt off, but then he didn’t want to do that. He said it was cold out, but in the long run, I was surmising that at this point, he didn’t want to use his body to represent himself.



IO: Tell us about your experience taking pictures of Queen Elizabeth II. That was a great chapter.



AL: It was the first thing I sat down with Sharon and talked about, because I had just done it and I decided to make that chapter particularly detailed—go into the nuts and bolts of the shoot, take it apart from beginning to end. It’s the longest chapter because it goes into such detail.
There’s controversy surrounding the shoot because the BBC was there filming her for a documentary, spending a year filming her and the monarchy. They made it look as if she was storming out of the shoot in a promotional film that they had for the documentary. And of course, it wasn’t true, she was actually storming into the shoot. Someone at the BBC lost their job because of the inaccuracy that they were trying to portray. It was a great shooting, and she stayed the entire time.
I’m pretty much used to most people not looking forward to having their picture taken, because that’s more common than someone liking to have their picture taken. It’s a difficult psychological thing to come to grips with. I think for the queen, of course, it’s just work, it’s more work. She’s in her 80s, and this cape weighed about 75 pounds.
I thought the shooting went very, very well, but in describing it, people think that that’s an unusually difficult shoot. It was—in the sense that you only have a certain amount of time and you’re in Buckingham Palace and it is the queen, so there’s a lot of pressure—but the rest of it? Everything that happened is kind of normal.



IO: You describe a scene in which you’re trying to make some small talk, and you mention Dorothy Wilding—the first woman appointed to be the official photographer of the royal family—and the queen says, “Well, she didn’t really take the pictures.” It sounded like a funny moment.



AL: I found it fascinating, because I had looked at a lot of material, a lot of books that had been done on Queen Elizabeth. Of course, she’s the most photographed person in the world, if not the most famous person in the world, so there’s a wealth of material. It was fascinating to look through how heavily she had to sit for portraits, especially after she was the queen, at a very young age.
The Wilding pictures were used for the stamps, for the coins. They were an important set of pictures. Dorothy Wilding was a very fashionable studio of its day. She employed over 30 people. So it was interesting to read about Dorothy Wilding, and then when I finally meet the queen, to say, “I understand there are a few other women ahead of me who’ve photographed you.” And then for her to give me this information that Dorothy wasn’t there.
I didn’t get a chance to ask her this, but it’s very possible that, since they were using 8-by-10 [-inch] cameras back then, that she could have had a man on the camera and she was standing to the side of the camera. She could have had a team, an assistant—and maybe all that Queen Elizabeth remembers is the man behind the camera.



IO: Can you tell us about that moment you refer to in your book when you “know whether you have it or not”?



AL: In retrospect, it really does come from experience. I think when I was younger, I didn’t really know if I had it or not. Whatever “it” was. I lived inside of the assignments, and went from assignment to assignment and didn’t know when I was finished. In that [chapter], I talk about the writer David Felton, who I was working with at Rolling Stone. I remember him once telling me he was done, he’d had enough. I couldn’t believe he’d had enough, I couldn’t understand what that meant, because I just didn’t quite know when it was over.
I think now it’s so different, looking back at it. My shoots are shorter. I feel like it’s either working or it’s not working. If it’s not working, you’ve just got to stop and change it somehow, or if it’s working, it’s over very fast. It’s more like that. And you just know.
When I did John and Yoko, we shot six or seven frames and you just knew it was good. It was powerful. It was just good. I pulled a couple of Polaroids. (Before we even shot the film, [we took] the Polaroid.) Or I might have shot the Polaroid and, at that time, it took 30 seconds or 60 seconds to process. So we could have shot a few frames and then I pulled it. Then I maybe shot a few more frames. It wasn’t very much. It was good right away.



IO: And you knew it. And they knew it.



AL: Yeah. You knew it. And I think that does come from experience. It does come from doing it all the time and looking at it. The most important thing you were taught to do at the Art Institute, in the photo department, was go out in the morning, shoot, come back that afternoon, process the film and look at it. And you just had to keep doing that, and keep looking at your work, so you kind of knew what you were doing.
Still, the most important thing that one needs to do is look back at their work, and edit their work, and see what they’ve done so they can go forward. You can’t just keep shooting, and not gather together and take a look at it. You need to sort of stop, and take a look at what you have.



IO: We’re conducting this interview in Athens, New York, overlooking the Hudson. You have a home up here. What has living close to the river done for your vision and your artistry?



AL: First of all, I just love getting out of New York City and driving up [north]. I’ve always loved landscape and views and horizon lines. It’s actually very frustrating because my buildings are actually set inland, even though I do have riverfront. I dream about eventually putting a small studio house on the river, but I haven’t done that yet, because I’ve spent so much time and energy on the old buildings themselves. That’s been a lot of work in itself. By the time I finished stabilizing all the old barns that I had, it wasn’t possible to build on the river.
But someday I hope to build on the river. The Hudson is glorious. Every time we drive across the bridge, I’m with my girls, and we say: “There’s the mighty Hudson.”