Wonderland

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Leibovitz is not simply among our foremost image-makers. She has essentially created a new form of portraiture for our time.' – Sherri Geldin, Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts The line between portraiture and fashion photography is thin, and no one balances more on that line than Annie Leibovitz. She continuously considers herself a portrait photographer rather than a fashion photographer, yet her images always have an unmistakable quality linking them to fashion photography. Her Wonderland exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Southampton, which takes its name from her first couture shoot with Vogue, shows the range of Leibovitz’s work. While many of these works may have been commissioned as fashion photography, the crux of Leibovitz’s work resides in revealing and capturing the subject, rather than simply the clothing. Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer whose style is marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject. Includes 350 extraordinary images (many of them previously unpublished) featuring a wide and diverse range of subjects: Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams, Pina Bausch, RuPaul, Cate Blanchett, Lady Gaga, Matthew Barney, Kate Moss, Natalia Vodianova, Rihanna, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Karl Lagerfeld, Nancy Pelosi. With a foreword by Anna Wintour. Specifications:

Whether she's photographing the famous and powerful – or simply the woman next door – Annie always captures something unexpected and deeply personal.' – Oprah WinfreyNow when we think of the little girl who grows, shrinks, and navigates all manner of odd encounters, we tend to imagine her in a blue dress with an Alice band. Much like Dorothy’s gingham and ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939) or Little Red Riding Hood’s, well, red hood, it’s an immediately identifiable outfit. However, the first authorised colour version of the book featured her in yellow. Anna Wintour, Vogue editor-in-chief since 1988, wrote the foreword, saying that “nothing is unphotographable for Annie; no request is too outlandish, too bizarre, too hard.” Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz’s surprising account of her encounters with fashion over five decades

Ms Leibovitz once hoped to become a painter, but soon ditched that ambition and attended night-school classes in photography. “Abstract painting of the time was too angry and I didn’t have the patience,” she says. In 1970 she got her start working for Rolling Stone; by 1973 she was the magazine’s chief photographer. “No one told me how to take a picture”, she recalls. She snapped John Lennon and Yoko Ono hours before Lennon’s murder, and with Hunter S. Thompson covered Richard Nixon’s last days at the White House.Edited and sequenced by Annie herself, the journey through the collected images shows just how the photographer has come to embrace the world of fashion, and bend it to her vision. Though you’d think it wasn’t so, this is the photographer’s first-ever collection of fashion images; she wanted to save them all for something special, as she states in the book. I’d love to shoot Angela Merkel,” she says. “I’ve been trying to shoot her for a few years now but her office keeps pushing it out, asking me to wait until she retires. And every time I see that she has had her photo taken by someone else, it drives me crazy.” Both she (behind the camera) and the subjects in front of it are, she thinks, engaged in an act of performance. Her work is imbued with theatrics. She snapped Angelina Jolie on the front of a hang glider, and Keira Knightley as Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz”. Ms Leibovitz’s mother was a dance teacher, and always signed her up for classes. “It changed how I look at things around the camera,” she says. There is a rhythm to her process, a one-two of intrusion and retreat. In 1975, Leibovitz served as a concert-tour photographer for The Rolling Stones' Tour of the Americas.

Much of the 72-year-old artist’s output blurs the line between photojournalism, which strives to document a fleeting moment to preserve reality, and editorial photography, which depicts its subjects in a stylised way to promote products, tell a story or attract attention. As a student, Ms Leibovitz found the friction between documentary photography and fashion shoots compelling. “The former was kept higher up while the other was considered commercial.” Annie Leibovitz began her career at Rolling Stone, shooting the world’s best loved musicians, and is now, decades later, one of America’s most highly regarded photographers, celebrated across the world, from The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, to Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, to Luma Arles in southern France. A] gorgeous anthology of fashion images … Leibovitz is nothing less than America’s greatest living photographic portraitist … she has changed fashion photography forever.” – Anna WintourA compendium of her greatest hits ... Her pictures are big, colorful, beautifully composed, egregiously luxuriant, loaded with detail, and nearly always contain some kind of implied narrative. "– The New York Times Book Review Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz’s surprising account of her encounters with fashion over five decades. This luxury edition is presented in a beautiful and elegant slipcase. Leibovitz is not simply among our foremost image-makers. She has essentially created a new form of portraiture for our time."– Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center for the Arts The person who has been the engine for keeping the work going for almost 30 years is Anna Wintour,” Leibovitz said. “She has reassured me, guided me, and sent me off to meet subjects who I admired and really wanted to work with and subjects who I never heard of and who turned out to be amazing people. She is benevolent, tireless, sometimes inscrutable, and almost always, in the end, right—or close enough. She is the wizard of Wonderland.”

Grace is very tough,” laughs Leibovitz. “Every time I would work with her, it’s like starting from scratch. Grace likes to remind me that I don’t do a lot on set.” In the spirit of collaboration, Leibovitz spoke to the group (just after Vanity Fair’s Radhika Jones and Phaidon CEO Keith Fox delivered heartwarming words of appreciation for the photographer) about the gratitude she felt toward Wintour. A compendium of her greatest hits ... Her pictures are big, colorful, beautifully composed, egregiously luxuriant, loaded with detail, and nearly always contain some kind of implied narrative.' – The New York Times Book Review Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz's surprising account of her encounters with fashion over five decadesHer work is often funny, too. “My approach to fashion has always been lighthearted,” she says. She revels in its inherent whimsy. Take for example, her shoot featuring Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of “Sex and the City”, in front a mountainous pile of pillows. Or her series depicting Natalia Vodianova, a Russian model, crammed into a tiny house as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in her wonderland. Whether she's photographing the famous and powerful - or simply the woman next door - Annie always captures something unexpected and deeply personal."– Oprah Winfrey When Leibovitz returned to America in 1970, she worked for the recently launched Rolling Stone magazine. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of Rolling Stone. Leibovitz worked for the magazine until 1983, and her intimate photographs of celebrities helped define the Rolling Stone look. Several collections of Leibovitz’s work have been published. They include, ‘Annie Leibovitz: Photographs,’ (1983); ‘Annie Leibovitz: Photographs 1970–1990,’ (1991); ‘Olympic Portraits (1996); Women,’ (1999), in collaboration with Susan Sontag; ‘American Music,’ (2003); ‘A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005,’ (2006); ‘Annie Leibovitz at Work,’ (2008; revised edition 2018), a first-person commentary on her career; and ‘Pilgrimage,’ (2011); ‘Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016,’ (2017); ‘Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970-1983,’ (2018); ‘Annie Leibovitz: Wonderland,’ (2021).