Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens

Annie Leibovitz is a famous photographer known for capturing images of numerous celebrities. She began with the idea that you should always be shooting through the lens of a camera. She would immerse herself and everyone around her in her photography. While on the road she would use families as subjects for her photos as she drove around the country. She took a lot of pictures to make sure she always had multiple options to choose from. Annie Leibovitz always had the idea to focus on the audience when shooting a picture. To her pictures tell a story about a person. Her photos had to symbolize something deeper than just an image. The people in the pictures were always surrounded by vivid imagery to convey a deeper narrative. When she met with the Rolling Stones magazine she would visit their office and try to engage in conversations with them. She would bring a bag full of photos and just as many questions to keep them engaged. When Annie Leibovitz got hired at Rolling Stones she developed a mindset after her first publication emphasizing that you should always keep an open mind when taking a photo. She never favored one photo over another and believed that all photos could be important in different ways. What was important to her was finding ways to connect a story to her photos. She put war and political events into her work because they had a significant impact on her life. Spending hours on the road traveling from one army base to another and her father being in the Vietnam war well she was against it. Annie Leibovitz believed that what set her apart from other photographers at Rolling Stone was her focus on both the story and the image. Focusing on one thing created a disconnect in what the photo was trying to convey. Going forward I will always try to keep in mind that photos need to tell a story on their own.