For more than half a century Annie Leibovitz has engaged in culture-defining photography. Her portraits of politicians, performers, athletes, businessmen and members of the royal family constitute a gallery of our times, imprinted in our collective consciousness both by the singularity of their subjects and by Leibowitz’s inimitable style.
Catalogue to the LUMA Foundation installation in Arles, France, Annie Leibowitz: The early years of 1970-1983 go back to Leibowitz’s origins. It begins with a moment of artistic revelation: a spontaneous snapshot that led Leibovitz to think she could move from painting to photography as an area of her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. The carefully and personally curated collection, which includes contact sheets and Polaroids, is a vivid document of both Leibovitz’s development as a young artist and a pivotal era.
Leibovitz’s photographic coverage for Rolling Stone, in which she began working as a student, captures such heady political, cultural and counter-cultural events as the Vietnam War protests, the launch of Apollo 17, the 1972 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, and the Rolling Stones tour in 1975. Then, as now, Leibovitz gained the confidence of the prominent and famous, and the book’s pages are brought to life by many familiar faces, including Muhammad Ali, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ken Kesey, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Didion and Debbie Harry, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, captured in their now iconic embrace just hours before Lennon was killed.
Throughout the book, portraits and reports are linked with images of cars, driving and even a series on the California Highway Patrol. In many ways it’s a celebration of life on the road – frenetic rhythms, chance encounters, meditative possibilities. And with its rich archival aspects, it’s also a tribute to an earlier time and a young photographer drawn into a culture that was itself in transition.
