Annie Leibovitz: WOmen
Leibovitz will be discussing Annie Leibovitz: Women, published by Phaidon, a powerful new collection from one of the most influential photographers of our time.
Leibovitz’s landmark 1999 book, Women— back in print for the first time in many years—is paired with a brand-new volume of photographs made from 1993 to the present. Susan Sontag’s classic essay for the 1999 book is joined by new texts by Gloria Steinem, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and a dedication from Leibovitz herself. Steinem’s essay is a personal account of how women’s rights have changed over the past 25 years and the future challenges of the next generation. Adichie’s essay answers the coded question ‘What is she really like’? that is so often posed about powerful women in the public eye.
Together, this two-volume set of more than 250 images offers an extraordinary 30-plus-yearretrospective of Leibovitz’s portraits of women: dancers, actors, astronauts, artists, politicians, farmers, writers, CEOs, philanthropists, soldiers, musicians, athletes, socialites, scientists. Her subjects are accompanied by biographical sketches, celebrating the individual power of each woman.
Among the most expansive portraiture projects of women by a living image-maker, Leibovitz’s Women illuminates the evolving landscape of womanhood in the 21st century. The subjects range in age from 13 to 91 and were photographed in over 90 locations around the world. In a career spanning half a century of defining images, Women may
be Leibovitz’s single greatest contribution to contemporary culture. More than a book or a series, it is an essential visual record of women at a moment when revisiting the canon of groundbreaking women has never been more urgent. With Women, Leibovitz cements her place as an essential documentarian of our era.
Annie Leibovitz is one of the most influential photographers of our time. For over five decades, her distinctive portraits have appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Her work is exhibited in museums all over the world. She is a Commandeur in the French government’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress. In March 2024, Leibovitz was inducted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
$80 for the lecture/$140 for the lecture + the book and the event takes place at 6:30PM.
Instructor
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Annie LeibovitzAnnie Leibovitz became a working photographer while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. She began taking pictures in the summer of 1968 and two years later one of her photographs was on the cover of Rolling Stone, which was then a groundbreaking counterculture magazine based in San Francisco. She was Rolling Stone’s chief photographer by 1973. By 1983, when she left Rolling Stone to join Vanity Fair and then Vogue, her photographs had become widely recognizable and distinctive interpretations of the contemporary landscape. Leibovitz was influenced early on by the personal style of photographic reportage developed by Robert Frank and by the photojournalism of Henri Cartier Bresson. The intimate engagement with her subjects evident in her journalism can be seen in the formal portraits of well-known people that she would later become known for. Intimacy remained a given in the work even as the range and approach of the photographs broadened. Over the years she would move from black-and-white to color, from covering rock concerts to making portraits of heads of state, from reportage to fashion, from graphically simple and straightforward composition to conceptually intricate digitally-based narratives. She is the recipient of many honors, including the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, and the Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des beaux-arts—William Klein. She is a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the United States Library of Congress. Several collections of her work have been published. They include Annie Leibovitz : Photographs (1983); Annie Leibovitz : Photographs 1970–1990 (1991); Olympic Portraits (1996); Women (1999), in collaboration with Susan Sontag; American Music (2003); A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 (2006); Annie Leibovitz at Work (2008, 2018 and 2024); Pilgrimage (2011); Annie Leibovitz : Portraits, 2005–2016 (2017); Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970–1983 (2018), and Wonderland (2021).Exhibitions of Leibovitz’s work have appeared at museums and galleries all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the International Center of Photography in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and LUMA Arles.
Annie lives in New York with her three children, Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle.
