‘You have to be insane, obsessed. You have to live it and eat it’ … Leibovitz’s big tip for photographers.

Annie Leibovitz’s latest exhibition of her photography is Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970-1983. It includes a shot of Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of her idols, during her time roaming Paris as a budding photographer.

The notoriously camera-shy Frenchman glares into her lens. “He wouldn’t let me photograph him,” says Leibovitz. “So I studied his route to work every day and planted myself on a bridge and waited. ‘You!’ he said, when he saw me. Then, ‘All right – take the picture.’”
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“It’s a show about photography,” says Leibovitz. “I can stand outside of myself and look back at this young photographer learning how to take pictures, learning how to see.”
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“I kind of know what people kind of want to look like,” says Leibovitz [about her portraits of celebrities]. “I can’t always achieve it. It’s like I’m a pushover. I really like to please. This is their life and I like to let them get to wherever the next step is they want to get to. I have no reason not to.”

Jordan Riefe, “Annie Leibovitz on the shots that made her,” The Guardian, 3-31-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.