Who can get the Queen of England to remove her tiara, judged "too dressed", to put a rabbit to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian the day before their wedding or to gather nearly one hundred Hollywood stars in one image? Annie Leibovitz, the best-known, most popular and best-paid photographer in the world.
She immortalized John Lennon, naked naked against Yoko Ono, a few hours before his death, plunged Whoopi Goldberg into a milk bath, unveiled the body of Demi Moore pregnant, painted that of Keith Haring in black and white to melt it into trompe- the eye in his work. Such intimate and cinematic clichés, teasing without being impertinent, become iconic. Her incongruous poses and baroque palette are so recognizable that she no longer needs to sign her portraits.
Taschen publishes a collection (1) to the height of his talent. A limited edition "sumo" with 476 pages, weighing 32 kg, reproducing 250 photos and recounting forty-four years of career. You will discover leaders, rockers, magnates, stars, sportsmen, writers, painters, dancers and designers captured by this entomologist of our time. Think of a famous person ... Annie Leibovitz photographed her. If not done, the person in question dreams of being so. As Cameron Diaz points out, "there are certain things that are seen as milestones toward Hollywood. One of them is to be photographed by Annie. "
How does one become the portraitist of stars? Born after the war by a father in the Air Force, Anna Lou, the third of a sibling of six children, grew up traveling from one military base to another. "My sister pointed out that my first frame was the window of the car," she likes to repeat. At the back of the family break, from Alaska to Texas, she immersed herself in the American landscape. A modern dance teacher, her mother, Marilyn, transmits her a taste for effort and a sense of movement. At the age of 17, Annie entered the San Francisco Art Institute, where she began painting and attended evening photography classes, a less solitary art that helped her socialize.
In 1970, after a year spent in a kibbutz in Israel, she submitted her portfolio to a nascent magazine, "Rolling Stone". After two short years, the publisher, Jann Wenner, named her the head of the photo department. Diving in the heart of Mecca of rock, this little girl of barely 20 years follows the tours of the Stones, assists the departure of Richard Nixon of the White House, after Watergate, alongside the authors Tennessee Williams and Hunter S. Thompson. From the top of her 1,80 m, always dressed in black, never made up, she does not try to please and knows how to make respect and forget.
"IT HAS OBTAINED ITS SUBJECTS FROM THE MONSTERS IN THEIR AREAS THAT THEY FOLD IN ITS VISIONS. »FRANÇOIS HÉBEL, DIRECTOR OF ARLES MEETINGS
"Jann Wenner was terrified that she'd be swallowed by this crazy world of drugs and rock-and-roll. But her roots, her family and her discipline hooked her up to reality, "says Paola Genone, a great cultural reporter at L'Express, to whom the photographer gave an exclusive interview in the spring. His work is progressing with the print quality of the magazine. Annie Leibovitz and "Rolling Stone" pass together in color, moving to New York. His 70s snapshots, believed to be musical riffs, follow the tempo of the time and, in the 1980s, gave way to more structured work.
1. "Annie Leibovitz" by Steve Martin, Carter Grayon, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Paul Roth, ed. Taschen, 2000
In 1983, the magazine "Vanity Fair" debauched her and offered him unprecedented budgets for editorial projects. She opens herself to other cinema, fashion, dance, politics and creativity with inventiveness and biting the vulgarity of the time. Surrounded by an army of assistants, she elaborates grandiose stagings, composed of pictorial frescoes licked. "She brought a lot of sophistication and concepts to her portraits, conceived as cinematographic productions, with scenery, accessories and light, and she got monsters in their fields from her subjects, and great manipulators, "François Hébel, director of the Rencontres d'Arles, was the first to exhibit his photos in 1986.
For Claire Guillot, a critic in the "World", "Annie Leibovitz succeeds in grasping something salient in personalities and constructing images that summarize their career in the eyes of the public, such as this ironic portrait of the billionaire Donald Trump at the foot of a jet, with his pregnant young woman, in gilded bikini. Some of his finds are very effective (his visual pun of Blues Brothers made up in blue), others more simplistic. In 1988, Annie takes a picture for a book by the essayist Susan Sontag, who will become her companion and her Pygmalion. In his contact, his work becomes more complex, darker, like this cliché of a bike ashore followed by a trail of blood, taken in Sarajevo in the 90s.
At the turn of the century, she signed a lifetime contract with "Vogue", and then gave birth, at the age of 51, to her daughter Sarah. Annie Leibovitz is a fierce Stakhanoviste and has a reputation for being rude. "She's an iron lady, in the sense that she will never make a picture over her leg. But it takes rigor and authority to get what it wants, justifies Fred Jagueneau, his assistant for seventeen years. It is prepared with extreme precision. Upstream, she learns a lot about her subjects and what has already been done about them. She works a lot her positioning, sometimes with linings. If a star has only five minutes to dedicate, she's ready. "
The gallery owner Kamel Mennour, who exhibited her nudes in 2001, keeps an enchanting memory: "It was the artist who impressed me most. In the typology of the years 1980-2000, it leaves an incomparable imprint, and many clones. But she is as uprooted in her art as simple and modest in life. Apart from Patti Smith, who has become a friend, Annie Leibovitz does not go side by side with the stars or copy the whims. The self-portrait never interested him. On December 28, 2004, Susan died of cancer. Six weeks later, Annie saw her father disappear, Samuel. In the following May, a surrogate mother gives birth to her twins, Susan and Samuel. In order to face grief, she re-enters her archives and draws a book (2), followed by an international retrospective mixing shameless show-business and intimate dramas. Two years later, she buries her mother.
KAMEL MENNOUR, GALERIST "IT IS ALSO UP TO THE BOUTIST IN HIS SIMPLE AND MODESTE ART IN LIFE"
2. "The life of a photographer, 1990-2005", ed. of La Martinière.
In 2009, the photographer who bills $ 100,000 portrait and $ 250,000 a day is almost ruined. One of the people who managed his finances was eleven years in prison, he had to clear a debt of $ 24 million. She then escapes with her daughters, without an assistant, for an intimate pilgrimage on the tracks left by the absent.
In 2011, in the album "Pilgrimage" (3), she delivers moving portraits without models: Emily Dickinson's herbarium, dead leaves in front of Virginia Woolf's house ... To retain her rights to her work , it multiplies the advertising campaigns (Disney, Vuitton) and sells its properties. Last January, she moves to the Upper West Side, on the landing of Robert De Niro. Aware of becoming a cog in the promotional machine, Annie Leibovitz lost the freedom of her debut. But it is now enough for her to give Anna Wintour a list of the people she wishes to meet for her wishes to come. However, as she confided to Paola Genone, her engine is now "to continue making portraits and keep them as a collection of beautiful butterflies".
3. Vintage Ed.
