Annie Leibovitz discusses the brand new quantity of her photograph ebook about girls

Annie Leibovitz strides onto the Wiltern stage to the thunderous cheers of 1,500 largely feminine followers. She takes her place on the podium, a small, casually dressed determine on a giant stage. On the display screen behind her are photos of the matching covers of her new two-book set, “Annie Leibovitz: Girls.” Quantity 1 is her 1999 assortment. Quantity 2 has 100 new pictures captured within the 25 years since. Taken collectively, the slipcased set zooms in on the previous quarter century of American womankind, rendered in 250 photos of dancers, actors, astronauts, artists, politicians, farmers, writers, CEOs, philanthropists, troopers, musicians, athletes, socialites and scientists.

“The ebook was Susan’s concept,” Leibovitz says on Tuesday, referring to author Susan Sontag, her accomplice till Sontag’s loss of life in 2004. “I assumed doing a photograph ebook about girls was a nasty concept, like going out and photographing the ocean. However then I heard what Hillary Clinton mentioned on the U.N. Convention on Girls in 1995 — ‘Girls’s rights are human rights, and human rights are girls’s rights’ — and I reconsidered.” Applause shakes the Wiltern rafters.

A picture from Quantity 2 seems, that includes a somber-looking Sontag. “That is the final formal portrait of Susan,” Leibovitz says. “You can assume she’s projecting a way of power, however actually, she was mad at me for making her go outdoors to take the image.” The gang roars with laughter.

Consider Leibovitz, and a few legendary pictures spring to thoughts. Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a milk-filled bathtub on the duvet of Self-importance Honest, July 1984. Additionally on VF covers: Michael Jackson, fittingly clothed and shot in black-and-white, in 1989. Demi Moore, absolutely pregnant and absolutely bare, two years later. However the photograph that is still Leibovitz’s most iconic to this point is the January 1981 cowl of Rolling Stone that includes a nude, fetal John Lennon wrapped round Yoko Ono. “John confirmed up bare,” Leibovitz tells the viewers. “Yoko needed to put on garments, so she’s absolutely dressed.” Leibovitz took the Polaroid on Dec. 8, 1980 — a number of steps away from, and some hours earlier than, Lennon was shot and killed by former fan Mark David Chapman.

In Quantity 2, we discover a barefoot Joan Baez sitting in a tree strumming her guitar; a pregnant Rihanna draped in jewels and fur; Billie Eilish dreaming over a journal with pencil in hand; Shonda Rhimes together with her ft up on a desk as huge as her oeuvre; and an uninhibited Michelle Obama as we’ve by no means seen her earlier than: chin raised, eyes closed, hair tossed again, T-shirt and denims parted to disclose her midriff. “I used to be in shock,” Leibovitz says. “However the first girl’s assistant was standing subsequent to me, shouting, ‘That’s my first girl!’”

Acquainted faces dominate, however woven between them are portraits of “common” American girls. A botanist precedes Oprah Winfrey, a philanthropist and a rabbi encompass the founding father of a Skid Row nonprofit, the reproductive rights activists of Mothers Demand Motion share area with a nude Girl Gaga. “I informed her to deliver a slip,” Leibovitz feedback. “I’d relatively individuals maintain their garments on at this level in my life.”

Quantity 2 consists of one essay every from activist Gloria Steinem, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Leibovitz herself. Steinem writes, “This ebook will assist us to find our adventurous true selves. … We’re atoms whirling in place, affected by and affecting these close to and much from the place we’re.”

Adichie agrees. “Taken as an entire,” she writes, “these pictures create a deeply transferring expertise, they refute the singular lens, they enjoy plurality’s energy, and due to — or maybe regardless of — their wide selection, they’re infused with a spirit that’s communal, collective, even unifying — and in the end hopeful.”

Leibovitz concludes the second ebook. “For this quantity I considered points which are necessary in the present day,” she writes. In 2016, when she was starting work on Quantity 2, the notoriously cloistered Leibovitz informed a New York Occasions reporter concerning the nationwide “speaking circles” she and Steinem had organized, through which girls shared their experiences with points together with sexual violence, know-how and human rights. “Speaking in teams like that, it brings me to tears,” Leibovitz informed the reporter, including that the brand new work she was making for Quantity 2 was extra “democratic.” Quantity 2 is certainly extra various, probably in response to a broadly mentioned critique of Leibovitz’s pictures of Black girls.

No celeb survives fame with out buying a layer or two of tarnish. Within the many years between Volumes 1 and a couple of, Leibovitz’s representations of Black girls painted Leibovitz with hers. A 2022 Guardian story was headlined, “Annie Leibovitz proves but once more: she will’t {photograph} Black girls.”

“Leibovitz’s pictures are what occurs when Blackness is seen via a white gaze incapable of capturing its true magnificence,” contributor Tayo Bero wrote, referring to an inventory of Leibovitz topics together with Simone Biles, Viola Davis, Serena Williams and Rihanna. Bero wrote, “In all circumstances, she manages to make her topics look uninteresting, ashy, pained and unhappy, a far cry from the vigorous and sleek people who they normally are.”

Bero and others notably criticized a picture Leibovitz made for Vogue, depicting Supreme Court docket Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Lincoln Memorial. Within the photograph, the snow-white marble statue takes middle stage, overlooking Brown Jackson on the decrease left. On the Wiltern, when that picture seems, Leibovitz speaks of her personal expertise capturing it, not the controversy surrounding its publication. “I used to be skeptical about that concept,” Leibovitz says. “However she walked into the rotunda and he or she began studying Lincoln’s phrases which are engraved into the wall. It was such a transferring second.”

Two years later, the controversy was reawakened by Leibovitz’s depictions of Zendaya, additionally in Vogue. An April 2024 piece on the web site Screenshot Media reiterated the pictures’ failure to precisely mirror “the great thing about melanated pores and skin tones, with poor lighting that always ends in lackluster portrayals.”

In her introductory essay to Quantity 2, Adichie, however, praises Leibovitz’s sensitivity. “The primary time Annie photographed me, greater than ten years in the past at my house, she sensed my discomfort immediately and knew it was not merely about my normal awkwardness with being photographed. It was particularly about my stomach, which was newly postpartum, though I’d in all probability nonetheless have frightened even when it wasn’t. … Annie’s sanguine response was a aid. There was no divisiveness, no judgment.”

Rihanna on the Ritz Resort, Paris, in 2022, from “Annie Leibovitz: Girls.”

(Annie Leibovitz)

Leibovitz, her representatives and her writer, Phaidon Press, declined to touch upon the critique. In an electronic mail interview with Phaidon Vice President Deborah Aaronson, who labored on 4 Leibovitz titles, Aaronson mentioned, “‘Girls’ reaffirms Annie Leibovitz’s place within the photographic canon. Within the ‘Girls’ collection, she captures a breadth of expertise and individuals who stay and work in numerous spheres that’s unparallelled. I imagine the collection makes her an important chronicler of girls over the previous 50 years.”

Annie Leibovitz entered the San Francisco Artwork Institute at 22, aspiring to be a painter. However an evening images class she took on a whim modified her medium, and her life. Whereas nonetheless a scholar, manifesting the boldness that will characterize her profession, Leibovitz pitched a Lennon shoot to Rolling Stone. Three years later, rendered immortal as the ultimate photographer of Lennon and Ono, Leibovitz turned Rolling Stone’s chief photographer.

In 1983, Leibovitz joined the employees of Self-importance Honest, the place her subject of exploration, and her social sphere, expanded to incorporate actors, athletes and politicians. In 1991, she turned the primary girl to have a solo present on the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She was designated a Library of Congress Dwelling Legend in 2000.

In 2001, at age 52, Leibovitz gave beginning to her first daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz. Sontag was at her bedside. In Could 2005, by way of surrogate, Leibovitz turned the mom of dual daughters, Susan (named for her beloved painter sister) and Samuelle. In 2009, Leibovitz was commissioned to make the official portrait of the primary household — President Barack Obama; his spouse, Michelle; and their daughters, Sasha and Malia — persevering with the connection that started in 2004 when she photographed Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate.

“I wish to {photograph} the White Home,” Leibovitz says, “however I don’t assume there can be a lot of it left once I get to it.” The night ended because it started: with the enthusiastic applause of her viewers.