Master Series: Working With Annie

	© Annie Leibovitz
	Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris, Brussels, Belgium, 1990.

Annie has said many times that the White Oak sessions were very important to her. That spending so much time with the dancers made many of the photographs possible.

White Oak was valuable. She learned a lot. And we became friends. She gave us all cameras and everybody became a brilliant photographer for a few weeks. It was a wonderful period.

There are some fabulous, dramatic pictures in the White Oak book. I'm thinking of one of them where we're rehearsing and Linda Dowdell—the musical director—is playing the piano. It's a picture of sort of nothing. And it's actually candid. It's what was going on. It's not what I'm doing in it that's important. It's within what I'm doing.

Annie was sitting there, snapping. That I let her in the room is already something. It was a very small studio.

Some of the photographs of the women dancers at White Oak were the basis for that series of nudes she did for the Pirelli Calendar.

Yes. I love the picture in the calendar of June Omura's legs. I like the nicks and the hairs. It's very painterly. There's an unbelievable sort of Titian ghastly blue-green color in all of the nudes. But they don't look cadaverous.

Of course the photographs we've been talking about are not what most people think of when they think of Annie's work.

Everyone has seen many, many pictures by Annie Leibovitz, whether they know it or not. It's part of the culture. Like the Love stamp. People know the image even if they don't remember that it was made by Robert Indiana. And because Annie does make those famous images, and shoots glamorous people, somehow she's not supposed to be able to photograph poor people or war or art.

But I like a lot of her more "commercial" work too. That picture of Ella Fitzgerald, for instance, was taken for an American Express ad, but it's also a picture of a darling black lady in a church hat. I love it. It's how she leans forward. It's the suit. It's the color. It's the gardenias or camellias or whatever they are in the background. It's the whole thing. The way she tapers, because she's so eccentric and old. The picture of George Bush in the White House is also great. It's like the scary Hapsburgs or something. I like those strange, cold photographs. The Trumps. The wife pregnant and naked on the steps to the plane. I don't want to marry them. But I really like the pictures.

The most terrifying pictures I've ever seen in my life are the fairy- tale spreads she made for Disney. The first one that appeared, with Cinderella on the stairs, kept me awake for nights. It was shocking. But I salute the weirdness of those pictures. I don't know how she did it. They're like zombie pictures. They impressed me enormously. I know it's because of the new digital cameras. But they're like Odilon Redon or something in their symbolist perversity.

Well, your take on the Disney photographs aside, which seems rather personal, would you agree that Annie's pictures pretty much always work, although one doesn't know exactly why?

They work even if the subject isn't famous anymore. It's like George Platt Lynes's portraits. Sometimes you don't recognize the person, but it's a gorgeous picture. You don't have to know.