Annie in Wonderland

“Wonderland,” the exhibition that opens at the MOP Foundation in A Coruña in Spain this week is not the biggest show Annie Leibovitz has ever done — it only seems that way, so vast and all-encompassing is it. She describes herself as a passionate bookmaker, and she loves putting together shows to accompany her publications, so it’s probably fitting that her biggest exhibition was also attached to her biggest and most personal book, 2017’s “A Photographer’s Life.” That show travelled all over the world. She eventually had to stop it, because she was worried it was beginning to feel outdated.

“Wonderland” the book was published in 2021. It was show-less at the time, which maybe unwittingly reflected Leibovitz’s feelings about her fashion photography, the focus of the tome. “I went into it reluctantly,” she admitted in a conversation last week. “I basically had squirreled away the fashion work. It was the poor man on the totem pole of photography. It was like I was doing it not only for fun, but to support Anna Wintour, who’s always supported me and all my portrait work. And Anna, having a journalistic background, really loved that I would apply that to fashion.” Leibovitz originally thought of the book as a kind of catalogue. “I always think about young people and young photographers and what they would like to see, and so in ‘Wonderland,’ I wasn’t editing my work, I was showing the complete story that ran in Vogue. And I really, really enjoyed that. I didn’t want to do a show for the book at the time, so this MOP exhibition is kind of my show for ‘Wonderland.’”

Another huge show was the last thing on Leibovitz’s mind when she was asked. Over the next couple of years, she’s planning a major retrospective with the LUMA Foundation in Arles, which showed “The Early Years: 1970–1983″ in 2017. But a recce to A Coruña changed her mind: not just the town itself but the dockside warehouses which Inditex chair Marta Ortega Pérez has taken over as exhibition spaces for her foundation. They were fortuitously filled with last year’s Irving Penn spectacle when Leibovitz visited. “It came exactly from the Met, and I thought it was remarkable they put the show up. I was weeping as I walked through it because he was certainly an inspiration to me. The bar was raised, for sure.”

Leibovitz follows not only Penn, but also David Bailey, Helmut Newton, Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh, MOP’s pantheon of fashion image-making immortals. So it was always a given that the exhibition would centre on her fashion work. “But I hope it feels like I did the opposite of what anyone else did,” she said. “I threw everything but the bathroom sink in there.” Which translates as a ten-foot-high wall of the black-and-whites that launched her career at Rolling Stone magazine (“No better way to show what I was like as a young photographer than to show you the Stones tour in 1975,” Leibovitz observed sagely), followed by rooms full of the colour portraiture that sealed her deal at Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, the extravagant fashion shoots that made her queen of Vogue, and the more arcane storytelling she has engaged with in response to that extravagance.

It’s a lot, but what it isn’t is any kind of retrospective. There’s no John and Yoko, or Keith Haring, or Springsteen or pregnant Demi, to name just four of the Leibovitz portraits that crossed the line from magazine cover to cultural icon. That’s because Leibovitz felt it was critical to show the roots of her fashion work. “I wasn’t like a fashion photographer, so where did it come from? I have a small section in the beginning of ‘Wonderland’ that shows you the history of some work that I’ve done, and the beginning of noticing how what people are wearing — or not wearing — matters in a portrait.

She had her own canon of great fashion photographers whose work she admired, but Vogue really began as playtime for Leibovitz. “I never took the early fashion seriously because I just thought it was funny. I remember photographing Meryl Streep early on, one of the first things I did for Vogue. I told her, ‘Oh, just pretend you’re a fashion model’, because Meryl Streep really likes to play a role. So we were just hopping around. We didn’t know what a fashion model was. Also, I was younger, and I was having children, and we did all these crazy fairy tales, and I had wonderful people to work with. Really, my best work is Grace Coddington. I didn’t have to think about the fashion, she took over in that world. I think I was more of a journalist and kind of enjoying the whole thing. And Natalia Vodianova was such a good actor. She was really important.” Inevitably, as Leibovitz learned more about fashion, she came to respect it, and understand that designers are artists. (Significantly, she feels the heart of her new show is her portraits of designers.) “And I have come to admire and love Anna Wintour in a way. I would do anything for her. ” Including photographing Timothée Chalamet for the cover of Vogue’s December issue, Wintour’s last as editor after 37 years at the helm. “I told her, when she goes, I’m going,” Leibovitz added.

“One of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Leibovitz called the Chalamet shoot, which took place at Michael Heizer’s ‘City,’ a stupefyingly monumental piece of land art in the Nevada desert. Heizer was fiercely resistant to the notion of a fashion shoot in front of something it had taken him 50 years to make. Leibovitz exhausted her powers of persuasion to bring him round. It was 110 degrees, with no cloud cover. “I thought it was important to say where we are right now. You know, it’s been pretty dark in America. I didn’t mean to be bleak, but Michael Heizer’s piece is not romantic. Anna said, ‘Remember, it’s Christmas.’ So Timothée on the cover is really the Little Prince. We put all the fashion into that image, and then I did a sort of low-key fashion story inside with Timothée to keep the Heizer camp OK.” ‘City’ itself looks great, but Chalamet is miniscule in several of the shots, which was only one of the reasons why social media reached an instant, critical mass of negativity when the story was revealed online. “I saw Anna two days ago for breakfast, and I said, ‘Did we lay an egg?’” Leibovitz wondered mock-ruefully. “‘I’m not too sure what we did here.’ She said, ‘Annie, I love it, we love it, we’re not looking back, we’re just going for it.’ And she added, ‘Don’t read anything!’ Yeah, exactly. Timothée likes it. That’s all that counts.”

Leibovitz once observed that she likes landscapes without people in them. There’s something of that in the Chalamet shoot, and it’s also the prevalent spirit in a body of work she calls “Pilgrimage,” pictures of places and things that are distinctively unpeopled. “I find those photographs to be the cement between my other photographs. They seem to be segues between everything that I do.” Looking at the “Wonderland” work, it’s easy to imagine “Pilgrimage” as a vital breathing space because Leibovitz’s fashion photos are crowded with people in ingenious, often fantastic narratives, many of them shaped by fairy tales. Hence, Jasper Johns as the Cowardly Lion and Jeff Koons as the Tin Man in a Wizard of Oz-themed shoot with Keira Knightley as Dorothy, or Tom Ford as the White Rabbit tumbling down the rabbit hole with Natalia as Alice in a fantasia that seemed to ensnare every major designer in fashion. (Galliano as the Queen of Hearts! Gaultier as the Cheshire Cat!). Testament on one level to the erstwhile power of Wintour’s Vogue to draw anyone into its web, but also — I choose to believe — a tribute to Leibovitz’s own desire to tell a story in as multilayered a way as possible. She genuinely reveres dancers, artists, musicians, writers to such a degree that when she approached them for her Vogue scenarios, they melted. It made for fabulously unlikely magazine spreads, all the nabobs of high culture mixing it up with supermodels, and it even felt slightly subversive to see so many arcane threads drawn together under the umbrella of a fashion shoot.

“I think photography really is magic,” Leibovitz said. “I’m the biggest fan of photography, which is why, when I do something like this exhibition, I see it as an opportunity to show you how big photography is. I feel very responsible to it.” For 15 years, she shared her life with the writer Susan Sontag, whose 1977 book “On Photography” is one of the ur-texts of the medium.

How could I not ask what influence Sontag had on her? “First of all, I loved to hear her speak,” Leibovitz replied. “I couldn’t be mad at her too long, because she just was a great speaker. Sometimes I would go to a talk she would give, I would just listen to her and fall in love with her all over again. But we didn’t talk about photography that much. We lived together, we supported each other in our lives. Susan was very private, and she showed me things. I mean, I met Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Salman Rushdie. I met this whole other world. She always went out every single night, and she loved New York for everything that it had to offer. And I just tagged along, or was dragged along. I went with her to everything and experienced her life. I think I’ve always had a kind of a knack of attaching myself to someone that could show me something. She gave me a whole world of intelligence and knowledge, and she led by example.”

They may not have talked much about photography, but Leibovitz said Sontag loved it. “In fact, she would get mad at me that I didn’t take enough pictures. She’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you? Other photographers take pictures all the time.’ I was going through a period where I had to put the camera down because I lived with it, and it’s not like you don’t continue to see pictures, but I needed to fill myself up. I needed to have some life in it. I couldn’t just go around thinking everything was a photograph, which, of course, I probably do think. But I needed to have actual life. So she didn’t quite understand that part. She liked me working. She wanted me out there all the time working. But no, I credit her for Demi Moore being on the cover of Vanity Fair, because she called Tina Brown and said, You really need to do this. You know, even I didn’t understand what we did when we photographed Demi Moore like that. She understood things that I just didn’t understand. And I still don’t understand properly.”

In 1976, in her introduction to “Portraits in Life and Death,” a collection of her friend Peter Hujar’s photographs, Sontag quoted her own novel “The Benefactor”: “Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.” I wondered how those sentiments resonated with Leibovitz. “I think relating to Peter Hujar, probably it makes sense,” she said wryly. “That was a whole world — Hujar, David Wojnarowicz — she loved being a part of that period so much. By the way, the Peter Hujar portrait of Susan is probably one of my favorite pictures of her. My other favorite is Cartier Bresson’s. He walked up the steps, took the picture in five seconds, and then they went to lunch.”

Later in the conversation, we circled back to Sontag’s statement. “I wish she was alive right now,” Leibovitz said. “I would talk to her about it. She uses words. I think about her brilliance, which was really that she was so well read. But she also liked that film “Waterworld.” Sometimes her taste was so weird. She loved popular culture. I mean, she liked me. And I was at the peak of Vanity Fair cuckoo-ness. But she also made me serious. I had to work to bring back some of the humour after she died.”

Sontag couldn’t have wished for a better subject than Hujar to expound on her faith in photography as a memento mori. She died in 2004, so she was already long gone when Leibovitz published “A Photographer’s Life,” which, with its intimate, familial pictures of birth, ageing and death, and its huge turbulent landscapes, also conveyed a profound sense of the transience of life. “Susan died, my father died, my children were being born, and meanwhile, I’m going off to photograph Colin Powell or going to the White House. That’s going on while those other things are happening. It was an interesting idea to try to put them together. It’s probably my best book. And it was really a grieving process. When I did it, I didn’t know what I was doing exactly, I didn’t know anyone else was going to be seeing it, because it was so personal. I do equate it to Joan Didion’s ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’ She got it. She totally got it about how insane you get when someone you love dies, and what you go through. That was the photographic version of Didion’s book. I was pushed on by Susan the last time she got sick. No one really understands this. Susan wanted me taking pictures… [Leibovitz pauses to compose herself]… and that’s why I went to the funeral home and photographed, because there’s that whole aesthetic about photographing people when they die and they’re lying in state. There’s a tradition to it.”

The scope and substance of “A Photographer’s Life” is such that it plays like an appropriately imposing capstone to an impressive career. Of course, it isn’t. There have been more books, and a lot more work, and there’s that huge upcoming retrospective in Arles. Leibovitz reiterated that “Wonderland” at MOP isn’t a retrospective, but it still serves as a serious waystation for her. “This is more an homage to photography, what it does, what it can do, how it’s changed even.”

The biggest change is the obvious. “Digitally right now, you can’t help yourself,” she agrees. “But because I’ve been doing this for so long — I don’t know why I understood this early on — I don’t sit there and mourn the loss of some kind of technical thing that’s going away, like Kodachrome in the 70s. I’ve never been that enamoured with the technical aspect of photography. I mean, you have to kind of know what you’re doing a little bit, but I’ve always felt that content is more important. So when digital came on board, I knew it was what was going to happen. I think the hardest thing for me with it right now is sitting in front of the computer. But on the other hand, I sort of like learning to paint with it and not be embarrassed about it at all. Because I understood early on that if I use portraiture as kind of a front for what I do, then I could be conceptual.”

I mentioned something Nick Knight had said to me once about how the mobile phone meant everybody was a photographer now. He saw that as a positive thing. But had it changed the whole process of portrait-making for someone like Leibovitz?

“No, I was more worried about portraiture before,” she answered, “because when people didn’t really understand how they wanted to dress, or they would be dressed, it really felt like, ‘Oh, my God, is this the end of portraiture?’ Because you know for sure what someone is wearing has a lot to do with the portrait. It’s funny that I’m just thinking this now. I think that what I’m talking about is when you do a portrait, it’s not that the fashion is secondary, but it’s not as loud. And when you do fashion, you’re responsible to show the fashion. I tried to find a kind of balance in it, and I understand both ways. But I’m more interested in the portrait than the clothes. The clothes are important. I don’t underestimate the importance of the clothes. I just don’t want them to be the main part of the photograph.”

I threw another quote Leibovitz’s way, from Tim Adams’ review of a new exhibition of work by Jane Bown, portraitist for “The Observer” newspaper for 60 years, during which time the two women shared a few subjects, from Elizabeth II and David Hockney on down. Adams wrote, “It was fascinating to watch [Bown] come alive around certain kinds of characters, often actors and musicians and artists, in the knowledge that for a few charged minutes she could make them fully themselves and indelibly her own.” Did something similar happen with Leibovitz?

“Having done this over 50 years, I’m sure I’ve gone through every single shade of everything you’re talking about. I can only talk about now, which is, I do like showing people themselves for sure, and I like them to like themselves. Which is, of course, bad as a journalist. You know this thing of ‘I got their soul’? It makes me cringe. You’re doing something, and the circumstances for sure affect what you get, you know, but I think what the reviewer is saying is Jane Bown really enjoyed people who had a really strong sense of themselves. And I think artists do. They have a kind of confidence. I end the fashion section in this new show with a photograph of Diane Keaton… this makes me sad [again, she pauses to compose herself]… I underestimated how influential she was and inspiring to me and to so many women, to be able to dress the way you want to dress, and have her own kind of fashion sense. It was true when you meet someone who really has a great sense of themselves, whether that’s Queen Elizabeth or Rihanna…”

Or Kate Moss?

“I mean, a genius. I didn’t realize till much later how manipulated I was. And I say that in a good way. I was just thinking of photographing someone like Elizabeth Taylor, who had me come up to her makeup room before we started, and she had no makeup on, no eyebrows or anything, and you just become like the indentured servant. You’re there to serve them. You can’t believe they’ve shown themselves to you in such a way. You want to take care of them. But that’s the opposite kind of thing to someone like Kate Moss, or even Rihanna. I can’t even explain what goes on. In the book At Work, I try to talk about Rihanna, and I can’t. Maybe it’s magical. I think that’s maybe what happened with Jane Bown when she comes across someone who has that, and then maybe they haven’t really had the opportunity to see themselves as much and they get to see it.”

It’s the very nature of the demands on her that Leibovitz spends a lot of time looking back when she really wants to move forward, but there must be something rewarding in reflecting on past work through older, wiser eyes. “There’s a picture of my mother which raised the bar for sure, because I realized you don’t feel the camera’s there at all,” she said. I mentioned I was particularly partial to a photo of Keith Richards slumped in his wasted elegance during the 1975 Stones tour because it defined not just the band, but an entire era in music for me. “I think I’m more interested in the body of work than a single picture,” Leibovitz said. “I like how they’re kind of brothers and sisters to each other. I like what they do to each other when they’re next to each other. I like the series. It’s so fascinating to me seeing women next to each other in the ‘Women’ book. It’s not that it rounds us out, but it informs us. The diversity, the different ways to live our lives. I hope it’s gonna mean something in the long run.”

Leibovitz refers to the span of her work as a period, nearly 60 years during which she has intensely documented through the people who lived it. Obviously, it’s not over yet. “Which is why I don’t feel like there’s any kind of rush to the end here,” she muses. “What’s strange now is a lot of people that I photographed are dying. Like Robert Wilson just died, and Diane Keaton just died. It’s a period right now for people my age to start seeing them going away. And young people don’t know who they were. It definitely brings a lot of pause for thought about who we are, what we do, and what really matters.”

This period, as she calls it, happens to encompass what has surely been one of the most volatile stretches of time in human history, and her photographs of so many of its key players cast her as one of its key chroniclers. “I didn’t really know that was going to happen, but when I saw it start to happen, I thought that’s what I feel responsible to. I really like to stay current as best I can within reason, and then go out of the box. But you can’t get them all. It’s not possible.”

So Leibovitz, who has just turned 76, has made the decision to return to what really matters to her. “I know now why I want to leave fashion, and basically return to my portrait work.” Again, she insisted it’s nothing to do with a race against time. And yet… “I feel that with this sense of time passing, it’s important for me to concentrate on my portraits now. I have started to make a list of people who are my friends that I can’t believe I haven’t photographed. And I’ve always been photographing my children. They’re bigger now, so they don’t like it, but I’m still doing it.”

She talked about a section in the “Wonderland” show called “Stream of Consciousness,” work she has made over the past decade which she felt pointed the way forward. There are a lot of the creators she loves, many accompanied by photos of their studios, but there are also portraits of places and things: the sublimated violence of Elvis Presley’s TV set with a single bullet hole, the top hat Abraham Lincoln was wearing when he was assassinated… Mix it all up and you could almost form a curious psychological portrait of contemporary America, a not-so-Wonderland. There’s even a tellingly weird picture of the Trumps from 2008, with a Demi-pregnant Melania about to board the Trump jet in bra and knickers while her husband lurks in his Mercedes Gullwing beside the airstair.

Meanwhile, the other “Wonderland,” the one that is filling the warehouses of the MOP Foundation in A Coruña, can be enjoyed as a glorious kind of swansong for Anne Leibovitz’s life in fashion.