Inner Vision, Outer Limits

Annie Leibovitz is a camera.

The eyes are constantly clicking away--now on a flock of children flying down the beach, later on a perfectly round pink woman gazing out to sea. But for the moment, Leibovitz, a celebrity photographer as renowned as many of her subjects, is on the other side of the lens. She is squatting on Santa Monica Beach in a tailor-made, chocolate-colored Trafficante suit, the picture of insouciant elegance. Indeed, if she must choose between pristine, pricey fashion and just the right photograph, there simply is no choice--the artist will surrender all to the camera.

All, that is, except her relentless stream of mental images.

“You need your legs, right?” she tells the other photographer who’s shooting her hunkering down in the sand. “You don’t have any legs, you can’t work. Your body’s a tripod.”

Leibovitz, 42, may be single-minded, but her drive has served her well. At mid-career, she is at the top of her form and her field. A one-woman show of 80 celebrity portraits recently ended at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, making Leibovitz only the second living photographer--after Irving Penn--to be so honored.

The show has moved to New York’s International Center of Photography, where it was expanded to include Leibovitz’s earlier black-and-white journalism and her most recent work. The complete show will travel around the United States and Europe for the next three years, tentatively scheduled to stop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994.

An even more extensive collection of her work was published this month by HarperCollins in an elaborate coffee-table tome--”Annie Leibovitz: Photographs 1970-1990.” The homage is testimony to Leibovitz’s impact as the creator of some of the most arresting--and sometimes controversial--photographs in recent pop culture history. In Leibovitz’s conceptual world, Bette Midler lies literally in a bed of roses, Whoopi Goldberg grins up from a tub of warm milk, Clint Eastwood stands hog-tied against a Western set, and the golden Trumps pose amid golden Plaza Hotel cherubs and chandeliers, the incarnation of ‘80s excess.

“I think the thing that’s most important about Annie is that her work really has come to speak for a generation of popular culture and celebrity,” says Willis Hartshorn, co-curator of the show and ICP’s deputy director of programs.

There is, of course, her famous portrait of a nude and vulnerable John Lennon curled like a fetus around Yoko Ono, taken hours before he was slain. The now-celebrated photo almost didn’t make the cover of counterculture chronicle Rolling Stone, partly because it was taken during the days when Ono, accused of splitting up the Beatles, was widely reviled.

Lennon “was afraid Rolling Stone would run just him on the cover,” Leibovitz says. “But John took me aside and said: ‘I want both of us.’ It was two or three days after he died, and (the art director) was putting together covers of John by himself. I said, ‘I promised John that this would be the cover.’ ”

Editor-publisher Jann Wenner backed her up.

More recently, there was the rumpus over Vanity Fair’s August cover, which displayed a bare and pregnant Demi Moore, covered only by diamonds and a demurely placed hand. ABC’s “World News Tonight” declared Leibovitz its “Person of the Week.” And seven national supermarket chains scooped the issue off its shelves, sniffing that the cover wasn’t suitable fare for children.

But Leibovitz’s public has had only kind words for her work, sometimes slipping in the Demi Moore cover for her to sign along with her book. Still, the hubbub took Leibovitz by surprise.

“I thought it was a glamorous, sensational cover of Demi pregnant,” she says. “It turns out to be an important photograph for women. There’s a Western taboo about a woman being pregnant, even to the point where women are made to think they’re not beautiful.”

As chief photographer, first for Rolling Stone and later for Vanity Fair, Leibovitz’s images have been widely disseminated on the printed page. Their impact was only magnified with her recent portrait work for the American Express and Gap ad campaigns.

Leibovitz’s path--making art for commerce--”parallels the greening of American popular culture and its embrace by the American corporate structure,” writes New York Times art critic Roberta Smith. “In a time when rock stars are themselves corporations, why shouldn’t a rock photographer work for one of the largest?”

But if critics finally view Leibovitz as the chief photographer for American pop culture, over the years her identity has been seen through a constantly shifting lens.

“When I was at Rolling Stone, people called me a rock photographer,” she says. “When I was at Vanity Fair, people called me a celebrity photographer. And when I started doing the American Express campaign, people called me an advertising photographer.

“So I don’t know what will come next. I’m just a photographer. I’ve always been a photographer.”

Leibovitz tells her life in photographs, and one of her favorites is a hand-tinted portrait of her parents standing beneath an arbor. Her father, Sam, looks dashing in his Air Force uniform. You can see why her mother, Marilyn, a product of New York privilege and culture, ran off to marry this man from a small factory town.

Annie was born Anna Lou Leibovitz in Waterbury, Conn., her dad’s hometown. But the lingerie business he started there went bankrupt, and he rejoined the Air Force, taking the six Leibovitz kids on the road. They hit places like Biloxi, Miss., and Ft. Worth, and her back-seat youth touched off her romance with the road that still describes her incredibly hectic days. (She wears a watch with two settings--one set for wherever she is, one set at New York time so she can call her SoHo studio.)

Marilyn Leibovitz, a dancer who studied with Martha Graham, was always photographing the family, creating a snapshot history that influenced Annie’s later work.

“(Annie) starts with a snapshot mentality and extends it into something that’s much more complicated,” says Hartshorn. “She places people centrally in the frame. You’re aware of the interaction with the photographer, and she uses a background that seems to suit the subject.”

Leibovitz bought her first camera in 1968 on the way to the Philippines, where her father was stationed at Clark Air Force Base. There, she made one of her most famous photographs--a black-and-white shot of the tiny, wizened Queen of the Negritos grasping the wrist of an American soldier. A student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Leibovitz changed her major from painting to photography the next year.

She took her camera to a kibbutz in Israel and traced the steps of her idol, Henri Cartier-Bresson, in Paris. Back in San Francisco, she photographed Allen Ginsburg smoking a joint at an anti-war rally and took her pictures to Rolling Stone the next day. The magazine hired her virtually on the spot. Leibovitz was 19.

During Rolling Stone’s black-and-white early years, Leibovitz shot rock stars and politicians, running the cultural gamut of Grace Slick to Richard Nixon. In those days, she practically lived with many of her subjects, spending weeks on tour with the Rolling Stones to “catch life going by.”

“I was young . . . and their lives seemed much more interesting than mine, and I wanted to stay there,” she says.

When Rolling Stone turned to color, Leibovitz did too, creating the formal, posed shots she is known for. She moved to Vanity Fair as chief photographer in 1983, after 13 years at Rolling Stone.

“I wanted to see if I was Rolling Stone or myself, and I couldn’t tell anymore. I went to Jann and said Vanity Fair wanted me to work with them. He said: ‘You have to choose.’ I decided to move on. I needed to grow up. And Vanity Fair was Conde Nast, and there was that whole mystique of Conde Nast. This was the tradition of (Richard) Avedon and Irving Penn. As a portrait photographer it was very compelling.”

Better was also bigger--a broader range of subjects and a retinue of assistants (a half-dozen) after years of working alone. The switch from a solo working style was hard for Leibovitz, and her perfectionism earned her a reputation as difficult and demanding.

“I remember being angry the first few years, because why don’t these people know what I’m thinking? Can’t they realize that the light needs to be moved three feet?”

Leibovitz, a single New Yorker, typically works over two intense days spaced apart. She prefers to see her subjects at home so she can get an intimate sense of who they are, so she can find the telling trait that she can translate into visual terms.

Her two-day requirement was inspired by sessions with Robert Penn Warren at his home in Fairfield, Conn. “I went the first time and did these typical poet shots, lying under a tree reading a book, in his office with his books,” Leibovitz says.

“I left him and felt like I’d missed it. I called him up and, under the pretense of photographing him and his wife together, arranged to come back. I remember driving into the driveway and looking up and seeing him standing in his bedroom staring at me.

“I remember sitting him on the bed and starting to shoot. I asked him to take his shirt off. If I could have pulled back his skin to see his heart and his lungs, taking off his shirt was symbolic to wanting to get inside him and wanting to rip him open.”

While it is trademark Leibovitz to show exposed skin, she is also drawn to painting the sensual form with paint or mud. A nude Keith Haring painted in his own graffiti style crouches in Times Square. The Blues Brothers are literally blue brothers. Roseanne and Tom Arnold wrestle in the mud. Or, in the case of Christo, completely wrapping her subject in fabric and twine.

Perhaps Leibovitz’s most elusive subject is herself. When Vanity Fair asked her to do a self-portrait, Leibovitz shot herself in a bathroom mirror in Germany after she stepped out of a shower. It is far from her favorite photograph. “I did it very fast,” she says, “and it’s very hard to go to the other side of the camera.”

If she is relentlessly self-critical, Leibovitz is also constantly renewing herself. She is returning--but only very selectively now--to spending great chunks of time with her subjects, allowing them simply to be. Last year, she spent three weeks in Florida shooting Mark Morris’ and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, a series that finishes her book.

“I love the formal posed work,” Leibovitz says, “but one of the things about doing the book and looking back over the 20 years is I found myself very nostalgic for the early work. I thought the early work was very strong and very simple. Whatever happened in front of you, you shot. And the oldest work feels the newest.”

In a way then, Leibovitz comes full circle. It was important to her to do the book at 40, and now, with some sense of closure, she is thinking about moving on.

“I feel very young in my work,” she says. “This isn’t a retrospective. This is the first 20 years. And I feel there’s a lot of work to be done.”