Annie Leibovitz is internationally known for her photographs of celebrities in Vanity Fair magazine. She made headlines with her magazine cover of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore in 1991. On a more iconic front she photographed John Lennon before he was shot to death in 1980. She has worked with Hunter S. Thompson and even photographed Richard Nixon’s resignation. But she wasn’t always interested in portrait photography, or celebrities.
Annie started out as a painting student but found photography to be more instanteous and the community to be more friendly. She also had current events and location on her side: she lived in San Francisco at the height of the protests over the Vietnam war. But taking the pictures was not enough. She needed a medium to deliver her pictures to the public. She found a small, almost blank slate publication in the budding Rolling Stone magazine. This became her stepping stone.
What perhaps made Annie Leibovitz so successful, however, is her dedication to the art without sacrificing her personal work. In her book, Annie Leibovitz- At Work, Annie talks about her love of Richard Avedon’s work, and how she spent a lot of her time looking at fashion magazines. But she did not read them for the fashion—she did it for the photography. Just because she had a job as a photographer did not mean she had to stop learning. For Annie Leibovitz, it is all about a personal and intimate photo, and through experience and research, she was able to achieve that and use that talent to photograph people like Queen Elizabeth II.
To read more about Richard Avedon and the history of Fashion Photography go to:
http://www.examiner.com/fashion-photography-in-raleigh/history-of-fashion-photography
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Leibovitz
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780375505102.html
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