Leibovitz, Annie

A Living Legend

Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Leibovitz was interested in the arts as a teenager and was drawn to a wide range of creative output, from music and painting to photography. She enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute to study painting. Later, however, she discovered that her real passion was photography.

[Page 838]In the 1970s, she started her photographic career by working for Rolling Stone. Her portrait of John Lennon appeared on the cover of the January 21, 1971, issue. While working for this magazine, she photographed many rock stars and musicians, including Bob Marley, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Sting, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. From Rolling Stone she moved to Vanity Fair, where her photographs, featured on the cover of the magazine, had celebrities as their subjects, including Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, and Jack Nicholson. In addition to music and movie celebrities, Leibovitz’ s portfolio also contains the portraits of famous politicians, such as the George W. Bush cabinet, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, the Queen of England, and the Obama family.

Her collection of photos titled Women was published in 1999 and contains more than 100 photographs. It is an impressive book, with powerful photographs of women living in America at the end of the 20th century. Photography has contributed widely to the stereotyping of women. In the accompanying essay, Susan Sontag considers the way Leibovitz undermines and complicates the image of women within the framework of a medium such as photography. For example, Leibovitz juxtaposes the portrait of the glamorous showgirl Narelle Brennan shot in color with a black-and-white portrait of Brennan as an ordinary woman in jeans and T-shirt holding her daughters.

Sontag points out the wide range of women's portraits shot by Leibovitz. In addition models of beauty, success, and self-esteem, she photographs models of aging and transgressiveness. The book contains portraits of powerful women (e.g., Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Supreme Court justices), artists (e.g., Louise Bourgeois, Susan Sontag, Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono), actresses (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner, Elizabeth Taylor, Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver), and sportswomen (e.g., Marion Jones, tennis players Martina Navratilova and the Williams sisters, and Ila Borders, the first woman to pitch on a man's professional baseball team). Among the “average women,” there are working-class women, a waitress, and a washerwoman. There are also plenty of portraits of “average women” whose occupations transgress traditional gender norms. We can see women as soldiers, drag car racers, mountain bikers, bull riders, coal miners, and rabbinical students. Thus, Women exemplifies the diversity of womanhood and undermines any concept of essence in “woman.”

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