Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970–1983 (Archive Project)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970–1983 (Archive Project) Details
Review “A reminder of the service Leibovitz has done for us in documenting so flawlessly the most important moments and people of the past three generations.” Read more About the Author Luc Sante teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the recipient of the 2010 Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography.Jann S. Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967. He has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors and is the recipient of the Norman Mailer Center’s Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Magazine Publishing.Annie Leibovitz’s body of work encompasses some of the most well-known portraits of our time. Leibovitz began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970 while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1983, when she joined the staff of the revived Vanity Fair, she was established as the foremost rock music photographer and an astute documentarian of the social landscape. At Vanity Fair, and later at Vogue, her work with actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and political and business figures, as well as her fashion photographs, expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life. Leibovitz has published several books and has exhibited widely. 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. Read more
Reviews
I did like this book, and I always appreciate Annie's work, but I have an issue here. This is a 50 dollar book that really is only worth about 30 dollars. There just isn't a lot of substance to it. It was fun to look at some of her older photos, get an insight into her days as a photographer for Rolling Stone before they were a cultural icon, but even so, there just isn't a lot going on here. The foreword by the LUMA foundation doesn't really tell us anything we don't already know (we know she was an art student before she took up photography, we know she started working at Rolling Stone when they were still fairly new). Annie has a foreword as well, and this is pretty good, but I feel that they should have asked her to add some captions to some of the photos. Several of them only take up part of the page, and it would have been nice for Annie to give us some insightful story about the photo in the space available. The photos are nice, even though most of them are jsut kind of snapshots. This is her early work, I wasn't expecting much more than snap shots, and it was cool seeing that even a legend had humble beginnings. A large chunk of the book is just foreign language translations of the few write ups in the book, so it is artificially a longer book (19 pages of this). This likely was done to avoid having to make foreign print versions, making the print run cheaper. I think these savings should have been passed to the consumer, since otherwise the book is kind of short (I got through it in about an hour, and that was stopping to really look at everything).In the end, if you really want some insight in the incomparable Ms Leibovitz, then I would say get a copy of her book Annie Leibovitz At Work. That book is loaded with substance, well worth the 50 dollar price tag. This one, well, I would say only if you are a big fan of Annie, which I am.
