Becoming A Photographer

Annie Leibovitz - selfie - 1970

Annie Leibovitz At Work is a good sized book, but it is easy reading and I made it to the end in a day. It is a book for people interested in photography, both those who appreciate the art and those who seek to practice it.

The author is generous in sharing the details of her long career including the development of her style and the equipment she used along the way.  I was struck in reading the first pages to find that she and I shared some time and  places as we both began our serious involvement with photography.  

In 1970 Leibovitz returned to her photography training at the San Francisco Art Institute and took her Minolta SR-T 101 onto the streets of the city where she soon found herself making pictures of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

I was doing the same with my Pentax Spotmatic.  Our paths quickly diverged from that point. One of her shots of the demonstrators found its way to the cover of Rolling Stone. The next year she again made the Rolling Stone cover with a portrait of John Lennon. Not hard to discern the reasons for the divergence from my trajectory.  She was young, pretty, sociable, smart and ambitious, and she very quickly developed impressive skills with her camera.

Leibovitz's skills quickly got her a regular position as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone and drew the interest of big magazine editors who wanted attention-grabbing pictures of media celebrities. That set the course for most of her career.

She continued using 35mm for quite a while, having moved up to a Nikon F.  Film remained the only option for a long time and the demands of her commercial work moved Leibowitz to take up a Hasselblad and later a Mamiya RZ67 along with developing her skills with lighting, mostly using strobes. The range of portrait subjects is staggering, from William S. Burroughs to the Queen of England, and every famous media personality in between.

Leibovitz provides a lot of excellent insights about how digital technology became the standard for any kind of commercial photographic work.  While the cameras and associated gear were initially quite awkward to work with, it was still a lot faster than anything that could be done with film with the exception of Polaroids that were generally unacceptable for publication.  She reports being especially impressed with the capability of digital in getting good results from color in low light situations.

I an pleased I got past my initial aversion to celebrity photography to look closely at Leibovitz's impressive career, which actually spanned a much broader swath of the photographic arts.  I'm looking forward now to making my way through her long list of published work.