Celebrity is not enough

Annie Leibovitz at Work, by Annie Leibovitz, edited from conversations with Sharon DeLano

When Annie Leibovitz started out as a photographer in 1968 her heroes were Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ turned out to be the antithesis of the celebrity portraits that have defined her career — not only posed but contrived and stagey. Her recent picture of the Queen standing against dark trees is faked up, with the trees taken the day before, and the figure added digitally. ‘You set the stage for them,’ she says of her subjects. ‘It’s studied. A kind of performance art.’

The other hero, Robert Frank, by driving across America in the mid-1950s, composed a narrative portrait of the Americans at one moment in their history. The strand of history recorded by Annie Leibovitz, from her days on Rolling Stone almost 40 years ago, and notably through her work for Vanity Fair, is spun chiefly from pop culture and celebrity. Just as patriotism was not enough for Nurse Cavell, celebrity cannot be enough for a photographer. ‘It’s not always fulfilling work trying to meet the expectations magazines have about movie stars.’

‘There’s always some thought behind my pictures,’ she says. ‘A lot of it is about play. Painting the Blues Brothers blue, for instance.’ Yes, well, that’s a thought, although it was one that annoyed John Belushi, who did not speak to her for six months. For Leibovitz, ‘conceptual pictures’ generally mean getting celebrities either to take their clothes off or put disguises on. Meryl Streep in white face-paint was intended to convey her insistence that she was ‘just an actress’. Whoopi Goldberg (above), semi-submerged in a bath of milk, is just Whoopi.

But what of Keith Haring in 1986, with his naked body, and the studio about him too, painted to look like a Keith Haring picture? After the session, Haring and Leibovitz went off to Times Square.