© Annie Leibovitz
Elizabeth II,
Buckingham Palace,
London, 2007.
© Annie Leibovitz
American soldiers and Mary, Queen of the Negritos, Clark Air Base, the Philippines, 1968.
"My father was a career Air
Force officer. In the late
'60s, he was stationed at
Clark Air Base in the Philip-
pines. It was the largest
American military base over-
seas and the main support
base for soldiers coming
in and out of Vietnam.
During the summer after my
freshman year at the San
Francisco Art Institute, where
I was enrolled as a painting
major, I stayed at Clark
with my family. I bought my
first camera that summer and
took pictures around the
base. I developed the film in
the base hobby shop. When
I went back to school
in the fall I signed up for a
night class in photography."
© Annie Leibovitz
Susan Sontag,
Wainscott,
Long Island, 1988.
© Annie Leibovitz
The Blues Brothers (Dan Aykroyd
and John Belushi), Hollywood, 1979.
© Annie Leibovitz
Steve Martin,
Beverly Hills, 1981.
© Annie Leibovitz
Keith Haring,
New York City, 1986.
"Most of my pictures that people consider exaggerated or visually extreme—like Whoopi in the bathtub, or the portrait of Lily Tomlin with hair from my hairbrush under her arm—were made with comedians, although one was a collaboration with an artist, Keith Haring. It was commissioned by a magazine in Florida that went out of business before the picture appeared. Keith and I had talked on the phone, and I asked him if he had ever painted himself. He said no, although a couple of years earlier Andy Warhol had arranged for him to paint Grace Jones and to have Robert Mapple-thorpe photograph her when Keith had finished. We decided that he would paint his torso for me. We shot in the studio, on a set constructed to look like someone's living room and then painted white. When Keith arrived he painted the room with black lines in less than 45 minutes. Then he painted his upper body in about five minutes. When he came out of the dressing room he was wearing white painter's pants, but it just seemed obvious to both of us at that point that he should paint the rest of him.
It's hard to paint yourself. Keith did only the front. I loved the way he painted his penis. It was so witty, with an elongated line."
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