How I shot my sister Annie ...
Annie Leibovitz has photographed celebrities from Lennon to the Queen, but how would this complex character react to being on the other side of the lens - with her sister as film-maker? Barbara Leibovitz reveals all to Rachel Cooke
The Observer, Sunday 3 February 2008 There are lots of reasons why making a film about Annie Leibovitz, our most famous living photographer, may be a bit intimidating. For one thing, photography is essentially static, so how to bring it to life on screen? For another, Leibovitz has something of a reputation.
Graydon Carter, her boss at Vanity Fair, likens her to 'Barbra Streisand with a camera', which is possibly shorthand for 'she's a nightmare on legs!' (I'm guessing that he isn't referring to her singing.) Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, admits that, yes, Annie is demanding, that the idea of 'budget is not something that enters into her consciousness', before quickly adding that she is worth it because 'she cares! she cares!' Even Leibovitz's flesh and blood, in this case, her sister Paula, confesses: 'You don't want to be anywhere near her when she's taking pictures.'
These days, you gather, the click of Leibovitz's fingers is almost as powerful as the click of her shutter: if her latest concept demands that, let's say, her team constructs a giant scale model of the Eiffel Tower and cover it with a flock of doves, strings of pink diamonds and hundreds of Jimmy Choo mules, so she can stick Nicole Kidman on top of it like a fairy sitting on a giant Christmas tree, so be it. Just be grateful that she didn't go with her first idea, which involved two dozen zebras, Hillary Clinton and the patience of the traffic cops who control Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington (possible Vanity Fair cover line: 'Why the race to the White House is not a black and white issue').
Happily, Barbara Leibovitz, another of Annie's siblings (there are six Leibovitz children) and an award-winning film-maker in her own right, did not flinch from the task of making a documentary about her sister. She tells me that the process of putting together Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens brought the two of them closer.
'It was challenging at times,' she says, with a mild laugh. 'I'm her little sister and there were moments when she would say, "Are you sure you want to do it like that?" But she is an absolutely private person. She needed to feel safe and secure and comfortable. I was able to do that and I learnt a lot about her in making the film; I saw different parts of her, parts that I would not [ordinarily] see. You don't want to be in the room with her when she's working, but that's the same for all of us. The creative process can be tense.'
She is grateful to have had the chance to set her sister's work in the context of the big, artistic family in which she grew up. 'My mum [a modern dance instructor] always had an 8mm [movie] camera in her hand. I remember, aged 10, threading the film into the projector. The camera was another member of the family.'
The girls' father was an officer in the US Air Force, which meant that the family was always on the move. 'We were raised in the car,' says Barbara, which is where Annie believes her career began. In the film, we see her driving her late father's station wagon, which she now owns. 'I love cars,' she says. 'Your body is taken care of ... your mind is free to wander.' Looking at the world through a car window, as she points out, is not unlike looking at it through the frame of a camera.
I had slightly dreaded watching Life Through a Lens and, as it began, a series of celebrities each saying the photographer's name, their faces pop-eyed with reverence, I was not hopeful. A film by its subject's sister, peopled with the grateful rich and famous who adore Leibovitz for the fact that she just makes them look so damned good: was this going to be a documentary or a piece of hagiography, a visual blandishment that would be up there with the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of her Vanity Fair work?
In fact, it's a satisfyingly thorough and honest film and, with its emphasis on Leibovitz's decade-long reign at Rolling Stone, her photographs of dancers and her fine documentary work, it might remind a few people that there is more to her than wind machines, wigs and body-paint. 'I wanted to show the huge range of her work,' says Barbara. 'People who know her for her Vanity Fair work may not know of her landscapes and her reportage work has never gone away; she's always doing it.'
The film also shows Leibovitz's human side. In several scenes, we see her with her children: Sarah, who was born in 2001 when she was 51 (as she admits, she really was one of those women who woke up one day, and thought: oh no! I forgot to have children) and her twins Susan and Samuelle, who were born to a surrogate mother in 2005. More significantly, she talks of her 10-year relationship with writer Susan Sontag, a subject which, before Sontag's death from cancer in 2004, was an open secret (Leibovitz did not publicly discuss the nature of her relationship with Sontag while she was alive; only after she died did she speak of her as a 'lover').
Leibovitz confesses that she was - and seemingly still is - amazed when America's leading intellectual 'decided she was going to know me... what the hell was she doing with me?'
This insecurity is touching, but unexpected. As Gloria Steinem puts it: 'She [Annie] is the tallest and most authoritative unsure person that I've ever seen.' Leibovitz photographed Sontag as she lay dying from cancer. In the film, as she and her editor consider photographs for inclusion in a book, Leibovitz looks at a picture of Sontag on a stretcher after her bone marrow transplant failed and momentarily breaks down.
Anna-Lou Leibovitz was born in 1949 (Barbara came along 11 years later) and began experimenting with photography when her father was posted to the Philippines during the Vietnam war, when she discovered the air force base dark room. But it was not until she went to the San Francisco Art Institute as a painting major and took a photography class that, as she laughingly puts it, 'it clicked with me'. In 1970, she pitched up at Rolling Stone, landed herself a job and began taking the remarkable portraits that defined the way the magazine looks.
The most famous of these is still her picture of John Lennon in a nude embrace with a fully clothed Yoko, taken hours before he was murdered ('The pieta of our times,' says Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's publisher, in Life Through a Lens). But, as Barbara makes clear, there was other work, too, like the remarkable series of photographs she took as Richard Nixon left the White House after his resignation.
In 1975, Leibovitz, at her own instigation, decided to go on tour with the Rolling Stones. Wenner urged her not to, believing that she would return a drug addict; as it turned out, he was right. Soon afterwards, Leibovitz went into rehab.
Does Barbara remember being worried about her sister? Again she laughs. 'Just think of the time!' she says. 'Who wasn't doing that? Everyone I knew was having wild times. That was the world we lived in.' In the film, Annie says, matter of factly: 'I got professional help and it was done. I took a deep, deep, deep breath and moved on.'
Does Barbara remember it being as simple as that? 'That's exactly what happened. She's very self-aware.' Keith Richards is among the 30 of Annie's subjects who Barbara interviewed, although, hilariously, he is mostly unable to remember the events photographed.
In 1983, Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair: 'Tina Brown [then the magazine's editor] put me to work.' And work she did, like crazy, believing, as she had been promised, that she would be Vanity Fair's own Edward Steichen. In fact, things turned out differently. 'It totally went glitzy,' she says, still bemused. 'The famous people are winning!'
Barbara, who spent a year filming, was given access to several Vanity shoots including, extraordinarily, one in which she creates a Wizard of Oz-themed set of pictures featuring Jeff Koons (done up as one of the Wicked Witch's winged monkeys), Brice Marden, Keira Knightley and the Penn State Marching Band. To watch Leibovitz in action is quite a sight. With her long hair, glasses and her loose, masculine clothes, she looks hippyish ('Love, love, love - I still believe in all that,' she says). But her manner is forceful; members of her vast retinue scurry in her wake. When she shouts: 'Wind machines! I need two!', you can bet they will appear within seconds.
'Just living in that world changes you,' says her sister Susan of her celebrity work. Barbara, however, insists that this is just another part of a long career, that there is no before and after. 'She has one life, not two.'
So does Barbara think her film has caught her sister? Because one of its most striking moments comes when Annie tells her: 'I don't buy into this idea that you've captured someone. I'm bewildered by that.' I disagree with this and so does Barbara, I think.
Nevertheless, she is reluctant to claim that the film snares Annie. Hours of material, she tells me, now lie on the cutting room floor and, in spite of the respectful reviews her film earned her in the US, she still mourns them.
Sister act: Leibovitz CV
Annie Leibovitz
Born in Connecticut, 1949, her father was in the US Air Force and her mother was a modern dance instructor. Her photographs of a naked John Lennon embracing a clothed Yoko Ono, taken hours before he was murdered, and a nude and pregnant Demi Moore, were named the top two US magazine covers of the past 40 years in a poll of US editors.
Barbara Leibovitz
One of Annie's five siblings and 11 years her junior, she has made documentaries for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel.
Graydon Carter, her boss at Vanity Fair, likens her to 'Barbra Streisand with a camera', which is possibly shorthand for 'she's a nightmare on legs!' (I'm guessing that he isn't referring to her singing.) Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, admits that, yes, Annie is demanding, that the idea of 'budget is not something that enters into her consciousness', before quickly adding that she is worth it because 'she cares! she cares!' Even Leibovitz's flesh and blood, in this case, her sister Paula, confesses: 'You don't want to be anywhere near her when she's taking pictures.'
These days, you gather, the click of Leibovitz's fingers is almost as powerful as the click of her shutter: if her latest concept demands that, let's say, her team constructs a giant scale model of the Eiffel Tower and cover it with a flock of doves, strings of pink diamonds and hundreds of Jimmy Choo mules, so she can stick Nicole Kidman on top of it like a fairy sitting on a giant Christmas tree, so be it. Just be grateful that she didn't go with her first idea, which involved two dozen zebras, Hillary Clinton and the patience of the traffic cops who control Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington (possible Vanity Fair cover line: 'Why the race to the White House is not a black and white issue').
Happily, Barbara Leibovitz, another of Annie's siblings (there are six Leibovitz children) and an award-winning film-maker in her own right, did not flinch from the task of making a documentary about her sister. She tells me that the process of putting together Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens brought the two of them closer.
'It was challenging at times,' she says, with a mild laugh. 'I'm her little sister and there were moments when she would say, "Are you sure you want to do it like that?" But she is an absolutely private person. She needed to feel safe and secure and comfortable. I was able to do that and I learnt a lot about her in making the film; I saw different parts of her, parts that I would not [ordinarily] see. You don't want to be in the room with her when she's working, but that's the same for all of us. The creative process can be tense.'
She is grateful to have had the chance to set her sister's work in the context of the big, artistic family in which she grew up. 'My mum [a modern dance instructor] always had an 8mm [movie] camera in her hand. I remember, aged 10, threading the film into the projector. The camera was another member of the family.'
The girls' father was an officer in the US Air Force, which meant that the family was always on the move. 'We were raised in the car,' says Barbara, which is where Annie believes her career began. In the film, we see her driving her late father's station wagon, which she now owns. 'I love cars,' she says. 'Your body is taken care of ... your mind is free to wander.' Looking at the world through a car window, as she points out, is not unlike looking at it through the frame of a camera.
I had slightly dreaded watching Life Through a Lens and, as it began, a series of celebrities each saying the photographer's name, their faces pop-eyed with reverence, I was not hopeful. A film by its subject's sister, peopled with the grateful rich and famous who adore Leibovitz for the fact that she just makes them look so damned good: was this going to be a documentary or a piece of hagiography, a visual blandishment that would be up there with the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of her Vanity Fair work?
In fact, it's a satisfyingly thorough and honest film and, with its emphasis on Leibovitz's decade-long reign at Rolling Stone, her photographs of dancers and her fine documentary work, it might remind a few people that there is more to her than wind machines, wigs and body-paint. 'I wanted to show the huge range of her work,' says Barbara. 'People who know her for her Vanity Fair work may not know of her landscapes and her reportage work has never gone away; she's always doing it.'
The film also shows Leibovitz's human side. In several scenes, we see her with her children: Sarah, who was born in 2001 when she was 51 (as she admits, she really was one of those women who woke up one day, and thought: oh no! I forgot to have children) and her twins Susan and Samuelle, who were born to a surrogate mother in 2005. More significantly, she talks of her 10-year relationship with writer Susan Sontag, a subject which, before Sontag's death from cancer in 2004, was an open secret (Leibovitz did not publicly discuss the nature of her relationship with Sontag while she was alive; only after she died did she speak of her as a 'lover').
Leibovitz confesses that she was - and seemingly still is - amazed when America's leading intellectual 'decided she was going to know me... what the hell was she doing with me?'
This insecurity is touching, but unexpected. As Gloria Steinem puts it: 'She [Annie] is the tallest and most authoritative unsure person that I've ever seen.' Leibovitz photographed Sontag as she lay dying from cancer. In the film, as she and her editor consider photographs for inclusion in a book, Leibovitz looks at a picture of Sontag on a stretcher after her bone marrow transplant failed and momentarily breaks down.
Anna-Lou Leibovitz was born in 1949 (Barbara came along 11 years later) and began experimenting with photography when her father was posted to the Philippines during the Vietnam war, when she discovered the air force base dark room. But it was not until she went to the San Francisco Art Institute as a painting major and took a photography class that, as she laughingly puts it, 'it clicked with me'. In 1970, she pitched up at Rolling Stone, landed herself a job and began taking the remarkable portraits that defined the way the magazine looks.
The most famous of these is still her picture of John Lennon in a nude embrace with a fully clothed Yoko, taken hours before he was murdered ('The pieta of our times,' says Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's publisher, in Life Through a Lens). But, as Barbara makes clear, there was other work, too, like the remarkable series of photographs she took as Richard Nixon left the White House after his resignation.
In 1975, Leibovitz, at her own instigation, decided to go on tour with the Rolling Stones. Wenner urged her not to, believing that she would return a drug addict; as it turned out, he was right. Soon afterwards, Leibovitz went into rehab.
Does Barbara remember being worried about her sister? Again she laughs. 'Just think of the time!' she says. 'Who wasn't doing that? Everyone I knew was having wild times. That was the world we lived in.' In the film, Annie says, matter of factly: 'I got professional help and it was done. I took a deep, deep, deep breath and moved on.'
Does Barbara remember it being as simple as that? 'That's exactly what happened. She's very self-aware.' Keith Richards is among the 30 of Annie's subjects who Barbara interviewed, although, hilariously, he is mostly unable to remember the events photographed.
In 1983, Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair: 'Tina Brown [then the magazine's editor] put me to work.' And work she did, like crazy, believing, as she had been promised, that she would be Vanity Fair's own Edward Steichen. In fact, things turned out differently. 'It totally went glitzy,' she says, still bemused. 'The famous people are winning!'
Barbara, who spent a year filming, was given access to several Vanity shoots including, extraordinarily, one in which she creates a Wizard of Oz-themed set of pictures featuring Jeff Koons (done up as one of the Wicked Witch's winged monkeys), Brice Marden, Keira Knightley and the Penn State Marching Band. To watch Leibovitz in action is quite a sight. With her long hair, glasses and her loose, masculine clothes, she looks hippyish ('Love, love, love - I still believe in all that,' she says). But her manner is forceful; members of her vast retinue scurry in her wake. When she shouts: 'Wind machines! I need two!', you can bet they will appear within seconds.
'Just living in that world changes you,' says her sister Susan of her celebrity work. Barbara, however, insists that this is just another part of a long career, that there is no before and after. 'She has one life, not two.'
So does Barbara think her film has caught her sister? Because one of its most striking moments comes when Annie tells her: 'I don't buy into this idea that you've captured someone. I'm bewildered by that.' I disagree with this and so does Barbara, I think.
Nevertheless, she is reluctant to claim that the film snares Annie. Hours of material, she tells me, now lie on the cutting room floor and, in spite of the respectful reviews her film earned her in the US, she still mourns them.
Sister act: Leibovitz CV
Annie Leibovitz
Born in Connecticut, 1949, her father was in the US Air Force and her mother was a modern dance instructor. Her photographs of a naked John Lennon embracing a clothed Yoko Ono, taken hours before he was murdered, and a nude and pregnant Demi Moore, were named the top two US magazine covers of the past 40 years in a poll of US editors.
Barbara Leibovitz
One of Annie's five siblings and 11 years her junior, she has made documentaries for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel.
