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Master Series: The Master Set

Annie Leibovitz Portfolio

By American Photo Staff · Photos by Annie Leibovitz
March/April 2009

Ask Annie Leibovitz to choose her own favorite photograph, and she will decline to answer. "I don't have a favorite photograph," she says. "What means the most to me is the body of my work. The accumulation of photographs over the years."

For this special issue, however, Leibovitz has selected images from what she calls her "Master Set." Many are well known, but not all. Many feature public personalities shot for magazines, but others are highly intimate and deeply private. A few, such as her 1968 image of soldiers at Clark Air Base, made at age 19 with the first camera she ever owned, are of historical interest. All of the images, says Leibovitz, capture some essential aspect of her photography. The Master Set is this remarkable photographer's own articulation of vision—of what makes an Annie picture an Annie picture.

"Photographs take on new meanings after someone dies. When I made this picture, I wanted Susan';s figure to give a sense of scale to the scene. But now I think of it as reflecting how much the world beckoned her. She was so curious, with a tremendous appetite for experience and a need for adventure. To get to Petra we went through a long, narrow sandstone gorge that opens up suddenly to a view of a huge classical façade carved into a cliff. It';s spectacular, with enormous columns and friezes. That';s where Susan is standing. She loved art, architecture, history, travel, surprises. The photograph epitomizes all of that for me. Discovery."

"I photographed John and Yoko in the late afternoon at their apartment in the Dakota, in a room overlooking Central Park. I was thinking about how people curl up together in bed, and I asked them to pose nude in an embrace. They had never been embarrassed about taking their clothes off. There was frontal nudity on the cover of Two Virgins, the first record they did together. They were artists. John had no problem with my idea, but Yoko said she didn't want to take her pants off for some reason. So I said, 'Oh, leave everything on.' I made a Polaroid of them lying together, and John looked at it and said, 'You've captured our relationship exactly.'

We were going to get together later to go over the transparencies, but that night, as John was returning home from a recording session, a deranged fan shot him. I heard the news from Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone. John had been taken to Roosevelt Hospital, and I went there and took a few pictures of the crowd that had gathered. Around midnight, a doctor came out. I stood on a chair and photographed him announcing that John was dead. Then I went back to the Dakota and stood with the mourners holding candles.

The picture looks like a last kiss now."

"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."

"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."

For the complete Annie Leibovitz Master Series including 50 pages of exclusive interviews and photos, pick up a copy of this month's American Photo on stands now.