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ANNIE LEIBOVITZPILGRIMAGE
RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK
2011
Leibovitz Takes A ‘Pilgrimage’ For Artistic Renewal
by NPR Staff
EnlargeAnnie LeibovitzIn 2000, the Library of Congress declared Annie Leibovitz to be a Living Legend. Leibovitz lives in New York with her three children.
Many of those sites are the homes and landscapes that prominent people once inhabited, such as Georgia O’Keeffe’s homes in Abiquiu, N.M., and nearby Ghost Ranch, and Ansel Adams’ darkroom in Carmel, Calif.
Leibovitz also photographed the artifacts of personal heroes and inspirational figures, including a heart target Annie Oakley once fired on, Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress and a 1957 Harley-Davidson Hydra Glide motorcycle Elvis Presley once owned.
Leibovitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote the book’s introduction, join NPR’S Neal Conan to discuss Pilgrimage, and how the project became a journey of personal and artistic renewal.
Tell us: What places do you visit to reinvigorate your artistic imagination?
Interview Highlights
On Niagara Falls, the image that inspired the book and graces its coverLeibovitz: “I was in the middle of, you know, a pretty nasty year there, and my children were a little frustrated with me not being around as much as I should have been, and I took them for a trip to Niagara Falls.
EnlargeAnnie Leibovitz, from her book ‘Pilgrimage,’ Random House, 2011Annie Oakley was known to demonstrate her marksmanship by shooting through the center of a small heart on a card. See more photos from Annie Leibovitz’s new book on NPR’s Picture Show blog.
“And they were standing there … mesmerized. And I walked over to where they were and I stood behind them and I saw this extraordinary vista — this sort of sense of floating over the falls, not unlike a Frederic Church painting, from a bird’s-eye point of view. I mean, you can walk up to this point. It’s not like it’s a difficult place to get to.
“And I took the picture. … This project was something that I had considered doing with Susan Sontag when she was still alive. And then after she died, it, of course, went away. … But I sat down again and started thinking of places and especially with … the introduction of the new digital camera, I was discovering that digital rendered in a more realistic way and you needed very little light.
“And so I was off. I was off. I made a crazy list, and just sort of went down a different path. I loved, I loved doing this project. It was great. It’s endless. Every single subject that I encountered, you know, had mounds and mounds of history and thought. And I only touched lightly on a lot of it.”
On what Leibovitz’s photographs mean to a historian
Goodwin: “Nothing matters more than to be able to catapult oneself back into time, to the place where the person I’m writing about woke up in the morning and went to bed at night, you know, the paths they crossed, chairs they sat in, what they saw when they looked out the window. That’s how you feel like you’ve re-created their daily life.
“And somehow what Annie’s been able to do, from Eleanor Roosevelt’s incredible house at Val-Kill, and then the sites in [Concord, Mass.] — which is my hometown — of [Ralph Waldo Emerson], [Louisa May Alcott] and [Henry David Thoreau], the studios, the workplaces, the libraries. It’s a different way of looking at re-creating life than the faces of the person, but … she has a visual genius.”
Pilgrimage
by Annie Leibovitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin Hardcover, 244 pages | purchase
More on this book:
Leibovitz: “I couldn’t quite understand how Julia Margaret Cameron did all of her pictures. It seemed like almost in a dark place. And she lived on an island. She lived on the Isle of Wight [in England]. And I never quite understood how that worked. And she was very close with [poet Alfred Tennyson] and walked the Downs every day.
“And I just thought it was strange that we never saw the island in those pictures — but of course not, because she was totally into the people she was photographing. And she was apparently a terror to have take your picture because, you know, in those days, you had to stay still for about seven or eight minutes, and her picture sessions have been described as very, very difficult.
“But the pictures were beautiful. They were extraordinary. They were not necessarily, you know, in focus. She had a lens that only had a very small focal length.
“And her son, who became a photographer, sort of berated her for her work being sort of soft. His work was very sharp, very clear, very well-developed, and it was kind of boring, you know, actually. So mistakes are part of what’s important.”
On visiting Georgia O’Keeffe’s homes in New Mexico
Leibovitz: “Probably the heart of the book, to me, is going out to [Santa Fe, N.M.] and seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s … homes in [Abiquiu, N.M.] and Ghost Ranch. … I just never had quite taken in how extraordinary she was. When I went to the home at Abiquiu, which she moved into after spending some time at Ghost Ranch, she went there for two reasons. One, there was a door in the patio area that she ended up painting over and over and over again.
“And then, that house had irrigation rights. So she could start her garden. So at the age of 50, she started a vegetable garden, and she started eating what she calls ‘correctly.’ But just to see how she lived and how frugally she lived and how sparsely she lived and … how you need very little and, you know, her views. … It was just a wonderful time to go through those buildings in that land and those vistas.”
Related NPR Stories
Debts Resolved, Annie Leibovitz Opens New Exhibit Oct. 14, 2011
Annie Leibovitz: The View From Behind The Lens Nov. 18, 2008
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Events
Dec 9
Book Signing: Annie Leibovitz’s Pilgrimage
ICP Store, 1133 Avenue of the Americas
Friday, December 9, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Join Annie Leibovitz for a signing of her book Pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The first place was Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls. “That’s when I started making lists,” she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud’s final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home and Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The Massachusetts studio of Daniel Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln’s portraits have been saved. Leibovitz made trips to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to Ansel Adams, she explored the trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for fifty years.
The final list of subjects includes Georgia O’Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her own. “From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”
Please note that due to professional obligations, photographer’s book signing dates may change without notification. Ms. Leibovitz is only signing copies of Pilgrimage. Limit of two signed copies per customer. Pre-orders and reserve orders are not guaranteed but every effort is made to fulfill orders. Books must be purchased from the ICP Store. If purchased before date of event, please bring your receipt. For more information, call 212.857.9725.
Free Friday night programs in the Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn.
Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The first place was Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls. “That’s when I started making lists,” she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud’s final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home and Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The Massachusetts studio of Daniel Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln’s portraits have been saved. Leibovitz made trips to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to Ansel Adams, she explored the trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for fifty years.
The final list of subjects includes Georgia O’Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her own. “From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”
Please note that due to professional obligations, photographer’s book signing dates may change without notification. Ms. Leibovitz is only signing copies of Pilgrimage. Limit of two signed copies per customer. Pre-orders and reserve orders are not guaranteed but every effort is made to fulfill orders. Books must be purchased from the ICP Store. If purchased before date of event, please bring your receipt. For more information, call 212.857.9725.
Free Friday night programs in the Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn.
© 2012 International Center of Photography
Photo Journal
Check out the images behind stories making news world-wide.- December 7, 2011, 9:56 AM
Annie Leibovitz’s Pilgrimage
By Rebecca Horne
Annie Leibovitz’s new book “Pilgrimage” opens with a series of photographs showing Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress, her pressed flower specimens, her rooms and the views she contemplated. Ms. Leibovitz explains the organic process that led to the book– it started with with an idea between Ms. Leibovitz and Susan Sontag for book called the Beauty Book. It would be a reason to go to places they wanted to see. Leibovitz writes: “After Susan died, I knew I couldn’t do the Beauty Book, although as time passed, I realized that I might do a different book, with a different list of places. The list would, inevitably, be colored by my memory of Susan and what she was interested in, but it would be my list. This wasn’t an idea that seemed obvious at first. It came gradually. Emily Dickinson was Susan’s favorite poet.”The book takes us along an idiosyncratic trajectory through the past. The tender photographs are tinged with murkiness–there is the shock of seeing the stained and worn desk of Virginia Woolf, followed by the waters of the river where she ended her life. History is rendered intimate in these relics and places. The photographs will also be on exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., from January 20 to May 20, 2012. To see The Wall Street Journal’s recent interview with Annie Leibovitz, click here.
Except for the portrait of Ms. Leibovitz below, all images courtesy Annie Leibovitz/Contact from the book “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011) © Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz prior to the installation of her show at the Pace Gallery, 29 November 2011. Julie Glassberg for The Wall Street Journal.
A pigeon skeleton from Charles Darwin’s collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring, England.
Sigmund Freud’s couch in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London.
Annie Oakley’s heart target. One of Oakley’s most popular stunts was shooting through the center of a small heart on a card from around 40 feet away. The actual size of the heart is 1 3/16″x1″.
A collection of handmade pastels in the O’Keefe Research Center in Santa Fe.
Niagra Falls, the cover of the book Pilgrimage.Museums
Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage
Annie LeibovitzObjects of her projection
By Philip Kennicott
Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2012Annie Leibovitz photographs the 1 percent, the rich, beautiful and famous, conspiring with the apparatus of celebrity and capitalism to make the lives of successful people feel even more glamorous and alluring. The Library of Congress has officially declared her a “Living Legend,” and despite a few financial problems awhile back – a massive home-renovation project in Greenwich Village contributed to the setback – she has joined the same rarefied ranks of privilege that she has so diligently served throughout her career. Her photographs are beautiful and scrupulous, and she has won just about every award a photographer can win, but there is something tragic about her oeuvre. Her pictures represent a bankrupt and vacuous world not as it really is, but as an ideal that both animates and mocks the 99 percent, the losers in our winner-take-all system.
So it is a bit of a surprise to see this subaltern handmaiden of the fame industry create a new body of work, on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, that is almost entirely free of portraits. “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage,” which opened Jan. 20, is billed as an intimate look at a personal journey she made during a period of emotional and spiritual crisis. Punctuated by the occasional image of the American sublime – the enormous torrent of Niagara Falls captured from above, the iconic plume of a geyser at Yellowstone National Park – Leibovitz’s pilgrimage is a photo record of her visits to the homes, gardens and stamping grounds of some of her favorite dead people.
She had planned a project called the “Beauty Book,” a collaboration with her longtime friend and companion Susan Sontag, the critic and polymath who died of cancer in 2004.
“After Susan died, I knew that I couldn’t do the Beauty Book,” writes Leibovitz in an essay that accompanies the exhibition. “As time passed, I realized that I might do a different book, with a different list of places. The list would, inevitably, be colored by my memory of Susan and what she was interested in, but it would be my list.”
That list took form slowly, and as it did, Leibovitz performed the stations of her pilgrimage with camera equipment in tow. The results are eclectic but mostly reflect the heroic pantheon of the bookish liberal establishment: Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the 64 photographs culled for the Smithsonian exhibition are images of Freud’s sofa; a rattlesnake skeleton displayed in the Abiquiu, N.M., home of O’Keeffe; a television set disfigured by a bullet hole, once owned by Elvis Presley; and the woven-cane bed that Thoreau slept on while at Walden Pond.
There isn’t much internal logic to this cabinet of curiosities, although in several cases photo curator Andy Grundberg has created dreamlike juxtapositions. Putting Freud’s couch and the darkroom of Ansel Adams in proximity suggests the unconscious of the photographic process, the hidden manipulations that lead to the polished surface of the printed image. The primal power of water at Niagara Falls, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful and the Spiral Jetty (an earthwork sculpture by Robert Smithson that is often submerged by the Great Salt Lake in Utah) suggests, respectively: deep emotional undercurrents, irruptive psychic forces and the play of surface and depth that governs so much of how we think about ourselves and the world.
The photographs make everything feel more real, closer, more textured and sensuous than anything found in real life. They have the inherent sexiness of glossy magazine imagery, and as you look at the interiors photographed at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Val-Kill, the cottage where Roosevelt lived and worked, the idea of a visit begins to seem futile. Why bother? The interiors could never look this good, this intimate, this inviting. In many cases, the view offered by Leibovitz’s lens is far superior to anything a tourist might have access to. The light is better, the detail clearer and you don’t have to bend over a display case.
Although she is photographing things, not people, it is not clear that this project, seemingly an homage to her heroes, is all that different from Leibovitz’s celebrity photographs. As Sontag wrote in her classic book “On Photography“: “One of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings.” That’s a perfect summation of how “Pilgrimage” relates to Leibovitz’s earlier work: Celebrity photographs objectify people, while “Pilgrimage” conjures the aura of celebrity from the objects once owned by historic figures.
Even the introductory essay by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, embraces the phoniness. Goodwin’s essay begins: “As a historian, nothing matters more to me than the chance to wander through the rooms where my subjects lived and worked.”
But “as a historian,” she ought to say that what really matters is archival material, ideas and facts, not PBS-style emotive rambles through the boudoirs and kitchens of dead presidents. And original research, given that Goodwin was accused of plagiarizing substantial amounts of text from multiple authors for her 2002 book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.”
But Goodwin has rehabilitated her career, in part, by practicing history as a form of public emotional spectacle, as if parodying in narrative form the famous suggestion by photojournalist Henri-Cartier Bresson that photographers search out “the decisive moment.”
This matters because there is a strange mix of insipid sentimentality and self-promotional personalization of history in this project. This supposedly private, restorative pilgrimage is a very public and narcissistic form of old-fashioned hero worship. Notice, for instance, how many times Leibovitz refers to her heroes on a first-name basis: Emily for Emily Dickinson, Virginia for Virginia Woolf, Eleanor for Eleanor Roosevelt. Or how often she photographs beds, and bedrooms, as if her pantheon is also a personal B&B, where the great and famous always leave the light on just for her.
Millions of Americans make some version of the kind of pilgrimage captured in Leibovitz’s images. Catering to this tourism has been an industry for a century or more, and there is a widespread belief that these visits help establish an emotional relationship between 21st-century Americans and their history. But warm feelings of personal connection to a historical figure don’t necessarily carry with them any particular understanding or knowledge of what that figure did. Not enough suspicion is directed at the inherently mythologizing tendency in this national pastime.
Certainly, none emerges from Leibovitz’s “Pilgrimage.” This is about celebrating the goodness of people, the beauty of things and stoking an insatiable desire to have and hold the sacred relics of history. Again, Sontag is the best critic: “Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world.”
This is no history lesson. This is an essay in consumption, the same restless appetite to feel close to famous people stoked by glossy images in glossy magazines.
By Philip Kennicott
Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2012Annie Leibovitz photographs the 1 percent, the rich, beautiful and famous, conspiring with the apparatus of celebrity and capitalism to make the lives of successful people feel even more glamorous and alluring. The Library of Congress has officially declared her a “Living Legend,” and despite a few financial problems awhile back – a massive home-renovation project in Greenwich Village contributed to the setback – she has joined the same rarefied ranks of privilege that she has so diligently served throughout her career. Her photographs are beautiful and scrupulous, and she has won just about every award a photographer can win, but there is something tragic about her oeuvre. Her pictures represent a bankrupt and vacuous world not as it really is, but as an ideal that both animates and mocks the 99 percent, the losers in our winner-take-all system.
So it is a bit of a surprise to see this subaltern handmaiden of the fame industry create a new body of work, on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, that is almost entirely free of portraits. “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage,” which opened Jan. 20, is billed as an intimate look at a personal journey she made during a period of emotional and spiritual crisis. Punctuated by the occasional image of the American sublime – the enormous torrent of Niagara Falls captured from above, the iconic plume of a geyser at Yellowstone National Park – Leibovitz’s pilgrimage is a photo record of her visits to the homes, gardens and stamping grounds of some of her favorite dead people.
She had planned a project called the “Beauty Book,” a collaboration with her longtime friend and companion Susan Sontag, the critic and polymath who died of cancer in 2004.
“After Susan died, I knew that I couldn’t do the Beauty Book,” writes Leibovitz in an essay that accompanies the exhibition. “As time passed, I realized that I might do a different book, with a different list of places. The list would, inevitably, be colored by my memory of Susan and what she was interested in, but it would be my list.”
That list took form slowly, and as it did, Leibovitz performed the stations of her pilgrimage with camera equipment in tow. The results are eclectic but mostly reflect the heroic pantheon of the bookish liberal establishment: Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the 64 photographs culled for the Smithsonian exhibition are images of Freud’s sofa; a rattlesnake skeleton displayed in the Abiquiu, N.M., home of O’Keeffe; a television set disfigured by a bullet hole, once owned by Elvis Presley; and the woven-cane bed that Thoreau slept on while at Walden Pond.
There isn’t much internal logic to this cabinet of curiosities, although in several cases photo curator Andy Grundberg has created dreamlike juxtapositions. Putting Freud’s couch and the darkroom of Ansel Adams in proximity suggests the unconscious of the photographic process, the hidden manipulations that lead to the polished surface of the printed image. The primal power of water at Niagara Falls, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful and the Spiral Jetty (an earthwork sculpture by Robert Smithson that is often submerged by the Great Salt Lake in Utah) suggests, respectively: deep emotional undercurrents, irruptive psychic forces and the play of surface and depth that governs so much of how we think about ourselves and the world.
The photographs make everything feel more real, closer, more textured and sensuous than anything found in real life. They have the inherent sexiness of glossy magazine imagery, and as you look at the interiors photographed at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Val-Kill, the cottage where Roosevelt lived and worked, the idea of a visit begins to seem futile. Why bother? The interiors could never look this good, this intimate, this inviting. In many cases, the view offered by Leibovitz’s lens is far superior to anything a tourist might have access to. The light is better, the detail clearer and you don’t have to bend over a display case.
Although she is photographing things, not people, it is not clear that this project, seemingly an homage to her heroes, is all that different from Leibovitz’s celebrity photographs. As Sontag wrote in her classic book “On Photography“: “One of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings.” That’s a perfect summation of how “Pilgrimage” relates to Leibovitz’s earlier work: Celebrity photographs objectify people, while “Pilgrimage” conjures the aura of celebrity from the objects once owned by historic figures.
Even the introductory essay by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, embraces the phoniness. Goodwin’s essay begins: “As a historian, nothing matters more to me than the chance to wander through the rooms where my subjects lived and worked.”
But “as a historian,” she ought to say that what really matters is archival material, ideas and facts, not PBS-style emotive rambles through the boudoirs and kitchens of dead presidents. And original research, given that Goodwin was accused of plagiarizing substantial amounts of text from multiple authors for her 2002 book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.”
But Goodwin has rehabilitated her career, in part, by practicing history as a form of public emotional spectacle, as if parodying in narrative form the famous suggestion by photojournalist Henri-Cartier Bresson that photographers search out “the decisive moment.”
This matters because there is a strange mix of insipid sentimentality and self-promotional personalization of history in this project. This supposedly private, restorative pilgrimage is a very public and narcissistic form of old-fashioned hero worship. Notice, for instance, how many times Leibovitz refers to her heroes on a first-name basis: Emily for Emily Dickinson, Virginia for Virginia Woolf, Eleanor for Eleanor Roosevelt. Or how often she photographs beds, and bedrooms, as if her pantheon is also a personal B&B, where the great and famous always leave the light on just for her.
Millions of Americans make some version of the kind of pilgrimage captured in Leibovitz’s images. Catering to this tourism has been an industry for a century or more, and there is a widespread belief that these visits help establish an emotional relationship between 21st-century Americans and their history. But warm feelings of personal connection to a historical figure don’t necessarily carry with them any particular understanding or knowledge of what that figure did. Not enough suspicion is directed at the inherently mythologizing tendency in this national pastime.
Certainly, none emerges from Leibovitz’s “Pilgrimage.” This is about celebrating the goodness of people, the beauty of things and stoking an insatiable desire to have and hold the sacred relics of history. Again, Sontag is the best critic: “Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world.”
This is no history lesson. This is an essay in consumption, the same restless appetite to feel close to famous people stoked by glossy images in glossy magazines.
Annie Leibovitz’s personal ‘Pilgrimage’ feels commercial
By Philip Kennicott, Published: February 6
That list took form slowly, and as it did, Leibovitz performed the stations of her pilgrimage with camera equipment in tow. The results are eclectic but mostly reflect the heroic pantheon of the bookish liberal establishment: Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the 64 photographs culled for the Smithsonian exhibition are images of Freud’s sofa; a rattlesnake skeleton displayed in the Abiquiu, N.M., home of O’Keeffe; a television set disfigured by a bullet hole, once owned by Elvis Presley; and the woven-cane bed that Thoreau slept on while at Walden Pond.
There isn’t much internal logic to this cabinet of curiosities, although in several cases photo curator Andy Grundberg has created dreamlike juxtapositions. Putting Freud’s couch and the darkroom of Ansel Adams in proximity suggests the unconscious of the photographic process, the hidden manipulations that lead to the polished surface of the printed image. The primal power of water at Niagara Falls, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful and the Spiral Jetty (an earthwork sculpture by Robert Smithson that is often submerged by the Great Salt Lake in Utah) suggests, respectively: deep emotional undercurrents, irruptive psychic forces and the play of surface and depth that governs so much of how we think about ourselves and the world.
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Exhibitions Home | Current | Upcoming | Past | Virtual
Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage
January 20, 2012 – May 20, 2012Museum: American Art Museum
Unlike Annie Leibovitz’s staged and carefully lit portraits made on assignment for magazines and advertising clients, the photographs on view were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject. They speak in a commonplace language to her curiosity about the world she inherited, spanning landscapes both dramatic and quiet, interiors of living rooms and bedrooms, and objects that are talismans of past lives. Although there are no people in them, the pictures are in a certain sense portraits of figures that have shaped Leibovitz’s distinctly American view of her cultural inheritance. Visiting the homes of such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, and Elvis Presley, as well as such places as Niagara Falls, Walden Pond, the Gettysburg battlefield, and the Yosemite Valley, she let her instincts and intuitions guide her to related subjects—hence, the title Pilgrimage. The pictures show Leibovitz at the height of her powers, unfettered by the demands of her career and pondering how photographs, including her own, shape a narrative of history that informs the present.
Related publication Pilgrimage: $50
Location: 2nd Floor, South
More Information- tikakar
A Pilgrim’s Progress
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
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Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)
Annie Oakley’s heart target from a private collection in Los Angeles, Calif.
By DOMINIQUE BROWNING
Published: October 29, 2011
“I NEEDED to save myself,” says Annie Leibovitz, explaining what motivated her new book of photographs, “Pilgrimage.” “I needed to remind myself of what I like to do, what I can do.”
Someone hung a filmy black camisole on the railing by Ms. Leibovitz’s door (homage or just a wild night out?) on the morning I made a pilgrimage to her West Village studio. It is a dazzling autumn day and the sun pours in like butterscotch; I can’t help it, when I think of Ms. Leibovitz’s memorable photographs, there is often a soundtrack. Over the years she has captured the idiosyncrasies of the musicians, actors and artists with whom the boomer generation has grown up — and grown older.
But there are no people in “Pilgrimage”; no celebrities, no models, no V.I.P.’s. The book is about something else entirely and seems to speak to a question Ms. Leibovitz has been mulling lately: How can she nurture her creativity as life gets more complicated? And how can she make the best use of the time left her?
“This is not human, meeting early on a Monday morning,” she says in greeting me. She is dressed all in black. “When I’ve had a good weekend with the girls, I’m exhausted. We had a great weekend!” Her daughters, a 10-year-old and 6-year-old twins, are central to this new body of work, though they are not present in it. Ms. Leibovitz’s journey began in August, 2009, when she tried to spend a few weeks of vacation with them. She was in crisis mode, the financial foundation of everything she had achieved under attack. She was spending long, exhausting months entrenched in acrimonious meetings with accountants and lawyers. Her children weren’t pleased. Her older daughter, she tells me, was quite articulate about it. “Mommy, this is a time when you are supposed to be with us.”
So Ms. Leibovitz planned a trip to Niagara Falls. Nothing went right. They were late getting on the road; their hotel room was given away; when they finally found a place to sleep, their room had a view of a cement wall. Ms. Leibovitz, fielding calls from lawyers as she approached the falls, couldn’t take them in. “I didn’t quite get it.” But she noticed that her girls were mesmerized. She went to where they were standing, and grew still. “I was stunned by the beauty of the water,” she says. The picture she took that morning became the cover of the book.
“It was hard as hell to do this book in the middle of everything I was going through. I was told constantly this book wouldn’t bring in money, and I should drop it. But I really wanted to do it. I needed to save my soul.”
“Pilgrimage” opens with shots of Emily Dickinson’s house that Ms. Leibovitz took, casually, while in Amherst, Mass., on a family visit. She visited the house next door, which belonged to Dickinson’s brother, Austin. “Austin’s house was a revelation. You could feel the people who had lived there. Austin’s young son had died in one of the small bedrooms, and I found that I couldn’t walk into it.”
She set those photographs aside. Before her partner, Susan Sontag, died, she and Ms. Leibovitz had planned to do a book of places they cared about. They made all kinds of lists of where they wanted to go. Years later, Ms. Leibovitz realized that she still wanted to do that book, with her own list.
Something about the Niagara trip with her girls stirred up memories of the Dickinson photographs and Ms. Leibovitz resurrected the idea of a pilgrimage. “There was a spiritual aspect to this journey at first,” she says. “It didn’t stay at that level — because I began to feel better. But somehow, it saved me to go into other worlds.”
She took her camera to Virginia Woolf’s house, photographing the surface of her writing table, and into her garden, capturing the wide, roiling water of the River Ouse, in which Woolf drowned herself. She photographed Dr. Freud’s sumptuously carpeted patient’s couch in London, and Darwin’s odd specimen collection. Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom, with its simple white coverlets, in her cozy cottage, Val-Kill, stands in contrast to a silver serving dish, its rich patina rippling with light. Abraham Lincoln’s elegant top hat and the white kid gloves, stiff with age, he had in his pocket when he was shot, make a startling appearance. Ms. Leibovitz visited Louisa May Alcott’s house, and photographed the view from Emerson’s bedroom window. The photo Ms. Leibovitz took of Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress hovers near the book’s opening pages like a beneficent spirit, a beautifully detailed, embroidered white ghost.
“I had to learn to photograph objects,” she says. “We don’t know Thoreau, do we? We have only his work, and his things. When I first saw the cane bed he slept on, I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
Perhaps the most intense visit in this project — yielding some of its strongest images — was to New Mexico. “While I was growing up, Georgia O’Keeffe represented a big idea, a stereotypical idea, for us, as women. But I never quite filtered it, never took her in.” When she was in New Mexico for an award, Ms. Leibovitz visited O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu. She began crying as soon as she entered O’Keeffe’s studio. “It was very emotional. She is the real thing. She has such a bad rap. I kept going back. The first hit I had was how little you need. She had her view. Her bed. She made her own pastels. She had music — she loved music. She had the best speakers! Not a lot of stuff.”
“I have a bit of a feeling that I’ve had it with people. But you don’t ever get away from people, really. And these are pictures of people to me. It’s all we have left to represent them. I’m dealing with things that are going away, disappearing, crumbling. How do we hold on to stuff?”
We talk about the creative process, about how to sustain it. “Talent is something anyone can have. It can go away. It needs to be nurtured, taken care of. The best thing about getting older is that you kind of know what you are doing — if you stick with something. It doesn’t get easier. But you get stronger. Pilgrimage is an exercise in taking care of what I do. My books are my way of being able to express myself completely.”
MS. LEIBOVITZ’S pilgrimage took her from the majestic power of Niagara Falls to Old Faithful, the famous geyser in Yellowstone Park. She found the look backward to the touchstones of our shared history refreshing. But she says the real reward is what happened after she finished the book. “Now when I take a picture, I can tell if I feel the pilgrimage in it. A rawness. A simplicity. I’ve gotten down to what matters.”
She isn’t about to live the pared-down life of Georgia O’Keeffe; even if she could, she wouldn’t want to raise her children in rugged isolation. “Having children changes everything,” she says. “I knew I was doing this work for my children. But of course, you want everyone to find their own way.”
Gazing at the traces left behind by her favorite artists, traces of their lives, their creature habits, Ms. Leibovitz finds something to nurture all of us — something about integrity, staying true to a vision. She forges a connection to the past that informs the way she is moving forward. “I would encourage everyone to make their own list,” she says. “My book is a meditation on how to live. It’s an old-fashioned idea, but you should always try to do what you love to do.”
Someone hung a filmy black camisole on the railing by Ms. Leibovitz’s door (homage or just a wild night out?) on the morning I made a pilgrimage to her West Village studio. It is a dazzling autumn day and the sun pours in like butterscotch; I can’t help it, when I think of Ms. Leibovitz’s memorable photographs, there is often a soundtrack. Over the years she has captured the idiosyncrasies of the musicians, actors and artists with whom the boomer generation has grown up — and grown older.
But there are no people in “Pilgrimage”; no celebrities, no models, no V.I.P.’s. The book is about something else entirely and seems to speak to a question Ms. Leibovitz has been mulling lately: How can she nurture her creativity as life gets more complicated? And how can she make the best use of the time left her?
“This is not human, meeting early on a Monday morning,” she says in greeting me. She is dressed all in black. “When I’ve had a good weekend with the girls, I’m exhausted. We had a great weekend!” Her daughters, a 10-year-old and 6-year-old twins, are central to this new body of work, though they are not present in it. Ms. Leibovitz’s journey began in August, 2009, when she tried to spend a few weeks of vacation with them. She was in crisis mode, the financial foundation of everything she had achieved under attack. She was spending long, exhausting months entrenched in acrimonious meetings with accountants and lawyers. Her children weren’t pleased. Her older daughter, she tells me, was quite articulate about it. “Mommy, this is a time when you are supposed to be with us.”
So Ms. Leibovitz planned a trip to Niagara Falls. Nothing went right. They were late getting on the road; their hotel room was given away; when they finally found a place to sleep, their room had a view of a cement wall. Ms. Leibovitz, fielding calls from lawyers as she approached the falls, couldn’t take them in. “I didn’t quite get it.” But she noticed that her girls were mesmerized. She went to where they were standing, and grew still. “I was stunned by the beauty of the water,” she says. The picture she took that morning became the cover of the book.
“It was hard as hell to do this book in the middle of everything I was going through. I was told constantly this book wouldn’t bring in money, and I should drop it. But I really wanted to do it. I needed to save my soul.”
“Pilgrimage” opens with shots of Emily Dickinson’s house that Ms. Leibovitz took, casually, while in Amherst, Mass., on a family visit. She visited the house next door, which belonged to Dickinson’s brother, Austin. “Austin’s house was a revelation. You could feel the people who had lived there. Austin’s young son had died in one of the small bedrooms, and I found that I couldn’t walk into it.”
She set those photographs aside. Before her partner, Susan Sontag, died, she and Ms. Leibovitz had planned to do a book of places they cared about. They made all kinds of lists of where they wanted to go. Years later, Ms. Leibovitz realized that she still wanted to do that book, with her own list.
Something about the Niagara trip with her girls stirred up memories of the Dickinson photographs and Ms. Leibovitz resurrected the idea of a pilgrimage. “There was a spiritual aspect to this journey at first,” she says. “It didn’t stay at that level — because I began to feel better. But somehow, it saved me to go into other worlds.”
She took her camera to Virginia Woolf’s house, photographing the surface of her writing table, and into her garden, capturing the wide, roiling water of the River Ouse, in which Woolf drowned herself. She photographed Dr. Freud’s sumptuously carpeted patient’s couch in London, and Darwin’s odd specimen collection. Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom, with its simple white coverlets, in her cozy cottage, Val-Kill, stands in contrast to a silver serving dish, its rich patina rippling with light. Abraham Lincoln’s elegant top hat and the white kid gloves, stiff with age, he had in his pocket when he was shot, make a startling appearance. Ms. Leibovitz visited Louisa May Alcott’s house, and photographed the view from Emerson’s bedroom window. The photo Ms. Leibovitz took of Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress hovers near the book’s opening pages like a beneficent spirit, a beautifully detailed, embroidered white ghost.
“I had to learn to photograph objects,” she says. “We don’t know Thoreau, do we? We have only his work, and his things. When I first saw the cane bed he slept on, I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
Perhaps the most intense visit in this project — yielding some of its strongest images — was to New Mexico. “While I was growing up, Georgia O’Keeffe represented a big idea, a stereotypical idea, for us, as women. But I never quite filtered it, never took her in.” When she was in New Mexico for an award, Ms. Leibovitz visited O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu. She began crying as soon as she entered O’Keeffe’s studio. “It was very emotional. She is the real thing. She has such a bad rap. I kept going back. The first hit I had was how little you need. She had her view. Her bed. She made her own pastels. She had music — she loved music. She had the best speakers! Not a lot of stuff.”
“I have a bit of a feeling that I’ve had it with people. But you don’t ever get away from people, really. And these are pictures of people to me. It’s all we have left to represent them. I’m dealing with things that are going away, disappearing, crumbling. How do we hold on to stuff?”
We talk about the creative process, about how to sustain it. “Talent is something anyone can have. It can go away. It needs to be nurtured, taken care of. The best thing about getting older is that you kind of know what you are doing — if you stick with something. It doesn’t get easier. But you get stronger. Pilgrimage is an exercise in taking care of what I do. My books are my way of being able to express myself completely.”
MS. LEIBOVITZ’S pilgrimage took her from the majestic power of Niagara Falls to Old Faithful, the famous geyser in Yellowstone Park. She found the look backward to the touchstones of our shared history refreshing. But she says the real reward is what happened after she finished the book. “Now when I take a picture, I can tell if I feel the pilgrimage in it. A rawness. A simplicity. I’ve gotten down to what matters.”
She isn’t about to live the pared-down life of Georgia O’Keeffe; even if she could, she wouldn’t want to raise her children in rugged isolation. “Having children changes everything,” she says. “I knew I was doing this work for my children. But of course, you want everyone to find their own way.”
Gazing at the traces left behind by her favorite artists, traces of their lives, their creature habits, Ms. Leibovitz finds something to nurture all of us — something about integrity, staying true to a vision. She forges a connection to the past that informs the way she is moving forward. “I would encourage everyone to make their own list,” she says. “My book is a meditation on how to live. It’s an old-fashioned idea, but you should always try to do what you love to do.”
Dominique Browning is a founder of Moms Clean Air Force, an antipollution organization, and creator of the blog Slowlovelife.com.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 30, 2011, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Pilgrim’s Progress.
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I listen to some boot-legs of different artists: Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, sometimes Led Zepplin, sometimes Merle Haggard. There is something about the rawness of a performance captured that makes me wonder what the artist was feeling and seeing in the moment, how the audience may have responded that makes me want to chase the muse again.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011 3:05:50 PM
So completely underrated you can have it to yourself, do what you like, and still make great friends being surrounded by some of the most ‘real’, down to earth individuals one is likely to ever stumble upon.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011 12:55:19 PM
DETROIT
Wednesday, November 09, 2011 12:53:11 PM
A few years ago, I spent some time in the fall in Martha’s Vineyard. I returned to the Denver airport and had to get in the car and drive up to the Grand Mesa on Colorado’s Western Slope. I must have stopped the car at least 3 dozen times to take photos that spectacular autumn. I kept (involuntarily) saying to myself, Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t hold a candle to the wild drama of Colorado.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 11:45:46 PM
Touché Jerry.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 8:55:10 PM
I go on a monthly overnighter to Cripple Creek CO. It is a beautiful & easy drive (for me). I’m not likely to run into anyone I know & I can enjoy the mindless pleasure of playing the slots.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 4:39:59 PM
Our family pilgrimage is the Abbe Ranch in Larkspur Colorado, which my father and his brother and sister built and lived in after the 3 children wrote a bestseller, Around the World in Eleven Years, in 1936. The family only lived in the house for a year before breaking up, but the current owners have kept the heritage of the Abbe Family tenancy, including the family name, and it is a Douglas County historic site. Abbe family visitors there in the 1930s included Ernie Pyle, Thomas Wolfe, Helen Hayes and other notables. It remains a touchstone for my aunt and uncle, and a monument to a difficult time, spent in a beautiful landscape.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 3:34:31 PM
Each time I visit my grandparents farm in central Kansas I am drawn to the barn. It’s big and red with our family name LOVE painted in large white letters. It’s one of the last of it’s kind still in use today. My grandfather is in his late 80s and no longer farms but this barn is a tribute to him and his many years as a Kansas farmer. I tote my camera around each time I visit, always taking away with me photos of the little things that make farms beautiful. Not only cows and horses but rusty tire rims and broken machinery. It’s all beautiful to me.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 3:32:54 PM
Whenever I can, I go to the sea. But I have found spending time at Monticello more and more a place that inspires me to be more.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 3:26:42 PM