From Darwin's specimens to eerie roads: Annie Leibovitz responds to Covid-19
Think of Annie Leibovitz and pictures of beautiful men and women swim to mind – the sorts of polished, scenario-led portraits with which the American photographer has been charming the readers of Vanity Fair and Vogue since the Eighties.
From actors to artists via intellectuals, dignitaries and leaders, the list of her subjects goes on and then some. Yet, as Leibovitz has admitted, she doesn’t always find this kind of work fulfilling: “I don’t often get to shoot the kind of things I like to photograph, in the way I like to photograph," she explained, when I interviewed her in 2016.
A new online exhibition that “opens” on the Hauser & Wirth gallery website on Friday offers the chance to see where Leibovitz’s famously creative mind takes her when she is off assignment and working under her own steam.
Alongside a sequence of new photographs that she has taken while under lockdown at her home in upstate in New York, are examples from a beautiful 2011 series titled Pilgrimage, when, during a period of extraordinary difficulty in her personal life, Leibovitz found solace in photographing the former homes and belongings of historic artists and writers with whom she identified or admired.
Pilgrimage began in 2009, when Leibovitz was beset by financial difficulties, and grieving for both her parents and her partner, the author Susan Sontag. At the former home of Emily Dickinson, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leibovitz had photographed clothing belonging to the poet, together with flowers that she had pressed as a child into a homemade herbarium, though at the time, the pictures were mere mementos, and she set them aside.
Several months later, though, she remembered them. While on a family holiday at Niagara Falls, and beset by now by regular and increasingly acrimonious phone calls with her accountants and lawyers, an exhausted Leibovitz was struck by how entranced her children were with the image of the roaring water, and stood still to let its magic work on her too. The photograph of the Falls she took that day later became the cover of the Pilgrimage book.
To these images, Leibovitz added others, many from a bucket list of places that she and Sontag had intended to visit before the latter’s death. The author Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, for instance, and the artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, along with Orchard House, where novelist Louisa May Alcott lived and worked, and the winding trails above Yosemite along which the photographer Ansel Adams had wandered in pursuit of his pristine landscapes.
Leibovitz also travelled to Britain, where she photographed inside the former homes of Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Darwin. As time went on, she began to use more sophisticated cameras and a tripod, but the project remained, she says, “very personal”. She added in a 2011 interview that “it was hard as hell to do... in the middle of everything I was going through.
“I was told constantly this book wouldn’t bring in money, and I should drop it. But I really wanted to do it. I needed to save my soul.”
Leibovitz’s new print, Upstate (2020), from which proceeds will go to the Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organisation, Black Lives Matter and Equal Justice, comprises a grid of nine photographs taken in and around her country home. They include fragments of a jigsaw puzzle on which one of her daughters has been working, a fish that was dropped by a heron, and the local road at night.
"Are these new pictures even photographs?" says Leibovitz, in a statement accompanying the exhibition. "I don’t know. They are more a response to this moment."
Details: hauserwirth.com
