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Camera Eye of the Counterculture
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19667 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,487 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
Asked how she would do a self-portrait, Annie Leibovitz, photographer of everybody who is anybody in American popular culture, pauses, uncomfortable with the question that calls attention to herself, that suggests that she too has become a celebrity who must now be documented by her sought-after eye. "What I want to do would be very simple, very straightforward, sort of that look you have when you come out of the shower. But it's much more work than I thought," she adds, as though thinking this might sound too out of character with the imaginative setups that have become her trademark, "because I do rely so much on what I see through the camera and in the frame."
And the faces Leibovitz has seen through her camera these last two decades--from the counterculture of the seventies on through the status-hungry eighties--collectively make a social document informed not only by Leibovitz's keen understanding of contemporary popular culture but her uncanny ability to sidestep awe and make images that enlarge our understanding of what Willis Hartshorn of the International Center of Photography calls "our extended media family." "When I say I want to photograph someone," Leibovitz writes, "what it really means is that I'd like to know them." Annie Leibovitz Photographs 1970-1990, the touring exhibition organized by the International Center of Photography, New York, in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and sponsored by American Express, lets us know them a little better, too.
Anna-Lou Leibovitz was born forty-one years ago, one of six children of a modern dancer and an Air Force colonel who moved from base to base. In 1967 she entered the San Francisco Art Institute to train as a painting instructor who would be an artist by night. That adolescent dream began to fade the following year when she bought her first camera. "I always wanted to do things really well," she says of her realization that her original plan did not represent success. In 1970 she walked into the offices of Rolling Stone (then located in San Francisco) with a shot she had snapped of Allen Ginsberg lighting a joint at a peace march. The three-year-old counterculture magazine paid her twenty-five dollars for the photograph and gave her her first assignment. Editor Jann Wenner, about to leave for New York to interview John Lennon, was so impressed with her portfolio that he took her with him. The Lennon shoot became her first Rolling Stone cover.
"They really needed someone," she recalls. "The good photographers in San Francisco were art oriented and didn't want to touch commercial work." By 1973 she was
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