New Works by Photographer Annie Leibovitz

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"Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage" charts a new direction for one of America’s best-known living photographers. Unlike her staged and carefully lit portraits made on assignment for magazines and advertising clients, the photographs in this exhibition were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject. The images speak in a commonplace language to the photographer’s curiosity about the world she inherited, spanning landscapes both dramatic and quiet, interiors of living rooms and bedrooms, and objects that are talismans of past lives.

The exhibition, which includes more than 70 photographs taken between April 2009 and May 2011, will be on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum  through May 20,2012. The works on display in the exhibition will be acquired by the museum for its permanent collection.

The exhibition will travel following its presentation in Washington, D.C. A listing of venues will be available on the museum’s website as they are confirmed. “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage” is organized for the Smithsonian American Art Museum by guest curator Andy Grundberg, former NewYork Times photography critic and associate provost and dean of undergraduate studies at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Joann Moser, senior curator, is the coordinating curator at the museum. The prints were made by David Adamson of Adamson Editions in Washington, D.C.

"Annie Leibovitz’s new project Pilgrimage captures some of the best aspects of the American spirit through individuals who shaped how we see the world and the places that define them, from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Emily Dickinson, Annie Oakley and Georgia O’Keeffe,”said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “These images resonate with other works in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, so I am delighted that we are acquiring a set for the permanent collection.”Smithsonian American Art Museum News.

“From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, this project was an exercise in renewal,” said Leibovitz. “It taught me to see again.”

“These pictures may surprise even those who know Leibovitz’s photography well,” said Grundberg. “They are more intimate, personal and self-reflective than her widely published work, combining the emotional power of her recent black-and-white portraits of her family with anawareness of her own cultural legacy. All photographs are in a sense intimations of mortality, but the pictures of ‘Pilgrimage’ make this connection explicit.”

The pictures, although there are no people in them, are in a certain sense portraits of subjects hat have shaped Leibovitz’s distinctly American view of her cultural inheritance. Visiting the homes of iconic figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pete Seeger and Elvis Presley,as well as places such as Niagara Falls, Walden Pond, Old Faithful and the Yosemite Valley, she let her instincts and intuitions guide her to related subjects—hence the title “Pilgrimage.” Some of the pictures focus on the remaining traces of photographers and artists she admires, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ansel Adams and Robert Smithson.

Visit your local library to learn more about Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz at Work
by Annie Leibovitz, (2008).
(Now) Leibovitz articulates her aesthetic, which she traces to her learning to see the world “through a frame,” the car windshield, because her military family moved so often, and tells the stories behind her daring, sensitive photographs. Certainly Leibovitz has had heady times, touring with the Rolling Stones, taking gleeful, high-concept portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Demi Moore, and many other spectacularly photogenic stars. But Leibovitz has also witnessed tragedy. The indelible photograph she took of John Lennon, naked and clinging to Yoko Ono, was taken only hours before his murder. As she reflects with humility and gratitude on all that she has observed, and shares what she has learned as an artist and a human being, her photographs, so lusciously reproduced, take on new dimension. — Excerpt of review by Donna Seaman first published November 15, 2008 (Booklist).

Women
Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag (1999).
The first portrait in Leibovitz’s superb gallery of women is of her mother, as fitting a presence as Sontag’s, which takes the form of a crisp essay on photography and women’s persistently undermined role in society. Sontag points out that the 170 women, both famous and unheralded, whom Leibovitz so artistically immortalizes, will be viewed as women always are, both as objects of beauty and as gauges of the achievements of the women’s movement. — Excerpt of review by Donna Seaman first published November 1, 1999 (Booklist).

Olympic Portraits
Annie Leibovitz, (1996).
A celebrated, highly stylized photographer of rock stars shooting Olympic athletes? That apparent anomaly seems just right when the photographer in question is Leibovitz, whose portraiture has always managed to capture the inner turmoil lurking beneath outward calm. Wisely, she chose to shoot her athletes not in Atlanta, surrounded by hoopla, but in preparation for the games, isolated and intense. What drives these stark, darkly lit black-and-white photos, though, isn’t our knowledge of the eventual results in Atlanta, but a sense of the overwhelming solitary confinement of athletic training, the peculiar loneliness that comes with the obsession to excel. These haunting photos will endure beyond our memory of who won what. — Excerpt of review by Ilene Cooper REVIEW. First published October 15, 1996 (Booklist).

Photographs, 1970-1990
Annie Leibovitz, (1991).
At 41, Annie Leibovitz is the reigning monarch of portrait photographers. This accompaniment to a retrospective exhibition that continues on tour through 1994 begins with her work for Rolling Stone in 1970, then follows the development of Leibovitz’ arranged, artificially lighted portrait style down to recent jobs for Vanity Fair and American Express. If her celebrity portraits seem, at times, to be caricatures, in that lies their strength, for they express Leibovitz’ perfect understanding of the culture of show-biz exaggeration that she records. — Excerpt of review by Gretchen Garner first published February 15, 1992 (Booklist).
 

Image credit: Annie Leibovitz at her SF exhibition by Robert Scoble from Half Moon Bay, USA (29 February 2008(2008-02-29)).