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Annie Leibovitz at Work | 
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| Author: Annie Leibovitz
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $21.99
You Save: $18.01 (45%)
New (39) Used (2) Collectible (2) from $21.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 63
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 7.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0375505105
Dewey Decimal Number: 770.92
EAN: 9780375505102
ASIN: 0375505105
Publication Date: November 18, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Book Description
“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."
—Annie Leibovitz Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras. Amazon Exclusive Essay: Annie Leibovitz on Photography
 In 1977, when Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, asked me to prepare a fifty-page portfolio of my pictures for the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine, I decided not to simply make a selection of photographs that had been published. I looked at everything I had done since I started working. It was a revelation. For one thing, I had no idea that I had accumulated so many photographs. You lose track of them when you’re working every day. And you see the work in a different way when you look at it from the distance of time. You get a sense of where you are going. You start to see a life.
I had the opportunity to edit my work most thoroughly when I prepared two retrospective books, Annie Leibovitz: 1970–1990 and A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005. It was thrilling to see that first book laid out chronologically. To see the pictures historically. The second book, A Photographer’s Life, was assembled immediately after the death of Susan Sontag and my father. Editing the book took me through the grieving process. The books are pure. They are mine. The magazines I work for don’t belong to me. It’s the editor’s magazine, and the editor has every right to use the material the way he or she wants to. It isn’t just that art directors and editors at magazines make selections that I wouldn’t necessarily make. Which they sometimes do. Or that they run pictures too small. Or that they put so much type on the pictures that you can’t see them anymore. Magazines have quite specific needs. It’s a collaboration only so far, which is true of almost all assignment work. When I began working on my new book, I thought it would be a pamphlet of maybe forty pages or so. I intended to take ten of my photographs and dissect them. They didn’t have to be my most famous pictures, just pictures that I cared about. But as I began going through the material I realized that I might as well be more ambitious. I started to think that I would try to answer every single question anyone has ever asked about how my work is done. To defuse the mystery, and the misconceptions. To explain that it’s nothing more than work. And learning how to see. So my forty-page pamphlet became a 240-page book with over a hundred photographs in it. It is written for someone like the person I was at the beginning of my career, when I was in art school. A young me. I didn’t know which road I would take. Whether it would be a commercial road, a magazine road, an artistic road, a journalistic road. It’s written for that person. Someone who is interested in photography but isn’t sure how they want to use it. The book is more emotional than I had imagined it would be. But, most importantly, it is my edit. No one is going to care about, or understand, your work the way you do, and if you are going to explain it you have to be able to present it the way you want to. That’s what a book can do better than any other medium. See Annie Leibovitz's 15 favorite photography books. (Photo credit Paul Gilmore)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
On A Scale of Five Stars I'd Give This Book At Least A Six! December 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This reviewer and long-time professional and amateur photographer has been waiting for a book containing this information to be published for years. And it's finally here and I for one am very grateful. For years I've wondered how Annie managed to take that incredible picture of a nude John Lennon kissing a fully dressed Yoko Ono while they were both lying on the floor. I had no idea that it was only a single test shot and that it was a Polaroid taken on the afternoon of his murder. That fact alone almost makes me revise my opinion of Polaroid photos. That small Polaroid certainly could be successfully reproduced for other uses.
Interestingly enough, Annie relates how strongly both John and Yoko felt about this image. You'll have to read the book to find out, however, I'm not going to tell.
Another photograph I've always admired was the Whoopi Goldberg picture with her mostly submerged in an old-fashioned bathtub of milk. How in the world did she persuade people to pose in such fantastic situations? Who knew that after only a few frames of her famous portrait of the Blue's Brothers, John Belushi would storm out of the shoot and was so upset with the blue paint she had put on his face that he wouldn't speak to her for six months? The nude profile photograph of a very pregnant Demi Moore was another of those remarkable photos I wanted to know more about. All these and many other nagging questions about the subjects of some of her famous pictures are answered in this autobiographic tome.
Those were only the subjects I was personally most curious about, but I was also interested in how a student in the San Francisco Art Institute who didn't even care much for Rock and Roll music would end up as the photographer for "Rolling Stone." That story had always interested me. How she was asked to go on tour with the Rolling Stones was another riveting tale. To make that coverage even more exciting Andy Warhol and Robert Frank (a photographer who Annie considers almost a God) were also on that particular tour making a documentary film about the Stones. Truman Capote was there too. This was the same young woman who John and Yoko had asked the "Rolling Stones" writer interviewing them "why he had a kid taking all the magazine's pictures?" They were used to being photographed by the most famous photographers in the world. The kid's pictures of them proved to be the most lasting and among their personal favorites.
There is a section in the book about her general photography philosophies and the technical equipment that she used to make her pictures over the years and how it has changed. There is also a section that answers the 10 most often asked questions that people want answered. There is something for everybody.
For a photographer or a "Rock & Roll" music fan, this is a "Must Read." For the average person, it's just a "great read." This is one of the most interesting books about a photographer's life and work that I've ever read and I've read and reviewed hundreds of them.
It was difficult, almost impossible to put aside this page turner once I peeked at the photos and started reading. So many of my long-term questions were answered and I didn't have to die and go to heaven in order to gain that enlightenment. Neither do you, dear reader.
 Biographical Notes, Technical Insights, and Inspiration . . . Portrayed on a Too Small Page November 29, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Any fan of Annie Leibovitz will want to read and cherish this book. The words and images will mean the most to young people dreaming of having a career in photography who wonder about how she got started.
Annie Leibovitz's photography has surrounded and informed us for so long that it has become part of the landscape, perspectives that we employ and too often take for granted. In Annie Leibovitz at Work, she takes us behind the camera a little to understand her motivations, her family, her career, her assignments, her purposes, and how those iconic images were constructed. I enjoyed the book very much but I found that it had two flaws that bothered me: She is a usually little too coy in holding back details that her disclosures make enticing. The page sizes are too small to properly display the images. The print quality is excellent, but you can only do so much when images intended for full magazine pages or portraits are displayed in 3 inch by 5 inch formats. A minor weakness is that some of the images she talks about aren't portrayed (presumably either a space or a permissions problem, but it is disappointing whenever it happens).
Here are some of the poignant stories in the book:
1. Taking the last portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono before John was murdered.
2. Photographing the Rolling Stones on tour while trying to keep a nervous independence from the parties and the crush of fans at the end of a concert.
3. John Cleese nearly suffocating to get the picture of pretending to be a bat hanging from a tree.
4. Capturing Al Sharpton at the beauty parlor.
5. Arnold Schwarzenegger changing his image through her photographs.
6. The story behind the pregnant cover of Demi Moore.
7. Cindy Sherman wanting to disappear in her portrait.
8. Capturing the war in Sarajevo.
9. The slaughter in Rwanda.
10. Posing OJ during his LA trial.
11. The arrogant photograph of the new White House team in town (December 2001).
12. Philip Johnson and his glass house.
13. Agnes Martin
14. Queen Elizabeth
Of the technical details, I was most interested in her descriptions of how she put together multiple shots to appear as one image.
Here are some of the many iconic images in the book:
Richard Nixon leaving the White House, Washington, D.C., 1974
Hunter S. Thompson and George McGovern, San Francisco, 1972
Tom Wolfe, Florida, 1972
Apollo 17, the last moon shot, Cape Kennedy, Florida, 1972
The Rolling Stones, Philadelphia, 1975
Keith Richards, Toronto, 1977
Mick Jagger, Chicago, 1975
Mick Jagger, Buffalo, New York, 1975
John Lennon, New York City, 1970
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, New York City, December 8, 1980
Tess Gallagher, Syracuse, New York, 1980
Robert Penn Warren, Fairfield, Connecticut, 1980
Bette Midler, New York City, 1979
Meryl Streep, New York City, 1981
The Blues Brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi), Hollywood, 1979
Steve Martin, Beverly Hills, 1981
Whoopi Goldberg, Berkeley, California 1984
Keith Haring, New York City, 1986
John Cleese, London, 1980
Andree Putnam, New York City, 1989
William Wegman and Fay Ray, New York City, 1988
Evander Holyfield, New York City, 1992
Willie Shoemaker and Wilt Chamberlain, Malibu, California, 1987
The Reverend Al Sharpton, PrimaDonna Beauty Care Center, Brooklyn, New York, 1988
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Malibu, California, 1988
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sun Valley, Idaho, 1997
Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer, Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1990
Mark Morris, Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1990
Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Paducah, Kentucky, 1988
Demi Moore, Culver City, California 1991
Cindy Sherman, New York City, 1992
Carl Lewis, Pearland, Texas, 1996
Sarajevo, 1993
Soccer Field, Sarajevo, 1993
Blood on a mission-school wall, Rwanda, 1994
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, Los Angeles, 1995
Patti Smith, New Orleans, 1978
Patti Smith, New York City, 1996
Puff Daddy and Kate Moss, Paris, 1999
Ben Stiller, Paris, 2001
Natalia Vodianova, Stephen Jones, and Christian Lacrois, Paris, 2003
Keira Knightley and Jeff Koons, Goshen, New York, 2005
Kirsten Dunst, Versailles, 2006
Cabinet Room, The White House, Washington, D.C. December 2001
Nicole Kidman, Charleston, East Sussex, England, 1997
Johnny Depp, New York City, 1994
Cate Blanchett, Los Angeles, 2004
Philip Johnson, Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 2000
William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Kansas, 1995
Agnes Martin, Taos, New Mexico, 1999
Marilyn Leibovitz, Clifton Point, New York, 1997
Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, New York City, 2002
Susan Sontag, Paris, 2003
Sharon Stone, Angelica Huston, and Diane Lane, Los Angeles, 2006
Kirsten Dunst, Bruce Willis, and James McAvoy, Los Angeles, 2006
Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, Los Angeles, 2006
Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet, New York City, 2006
Jack Nicholson, Los Angeles, 2006
Elizabeth II, Buckingham Palace, London, 2007 (4)
Hillary Clinton, New York City, 2003
Take a close look and enjoy!
A terrific introduction to the art and reflections of Annie Leibovitz November 24, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Annie Leibovitz is a well-known photographer. The first time I came to know of her was her work with "Rolling Stone" in the early 1970s. Later, she did photography for "Vanity Fair" and Vogue." This is an interesting volume. It is not a simple compilation of her photos, a coffee table book. The photos normally have a brief essay surrounding the pictures. Of her time at "Rolling Stone," as her career began, she observes (Page 11): "Being a photographer was my life. I took pictures all the time, and pretty much everything I photographed seemed interesting."
The heart of the book is photographs surrounded by her prose. One illustration is when she was designated the tour photographer for the Rolling Stoners' 1975 tour (I saw the group twice in Buffalo, NY that year--once indoors and once outdoors; what a trip!), although she also shows photos from 1977 (Catch Keith Richards lying down or with his son Marlon). She shows us several photos to give a sense of the tour. One of my favorites is Mick Jagger jumping into the air (see page 32). But it is her observations that make this an especially interesting part of the book, as she provides context for the photos.
Another interesting pair of photographs look at the singer Patti Smith. One photo was taken in 1978 and took place in a very hot room, with the singer sweating profusely (page 123); the other was taken about two decades later after the death of Smith's husband. Both photos capture something telling about the singer, just as the prose adds its own part to telling the story.
There are photos of Leibovitz' family, telling us something about the photographer as well as her family. On page 171, there are just four lines of her words to go with a photo of Susan Sontag, but those few lines are, for me, powerful. Another fascinating part of the book is several views of Queen Elizabeth II. The photos seem to provider a sense of this monarch that go beyond just a representation. And the prose in which the photos are embedded also add to the story. In a sense, as with other sections of this book, the prose and photos have a kind of synergistic relationship (obviously, I like the book by saying this!). The section called "The Road West" has two evocative images from Monument Valley that are most affecting. Other segments of interest: John and Yoko, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Hollywood.
This is a well done volume, wedding some exquisite photographs with the artist's reflections. The two go together well, making this a pretty compelling work.
Loved this book. November 24, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
I loved reading Annie Leibovitz At Work, it was so easy to read, very personally written. Almost like a conversation over coffee. Loved reading about Annie's inspiration and how she thinks through her images. Remarkable journey.
The stories behind the shots November 22, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
"At Work" provides a wonderful overview of Annie Leibovitz's career. And what a career it has been -- she's been on the road with the Rolling Stones, she's photographed the Queen of England, the list goes on and on.
Unlike many photo/text books, this is not a how-to book. Sure, there is information on the equipment used for particular shoots, etc. That's not at all what "At Work" is about, though. Instead, it seems to be more about Ms. Leibovitz's progression as an artist. She shares the difficulties, occassional insecurities and successes she's had throughout the years.
Rather than a behind-the-scenes look at the technical side of photography, "At Work" is (in my mind, at least) a behind-the-scenes examination of Ms. Leibovitz's growth as a photographer. And, while the photos are wonderful, they are not necessarily the book's focus -- they illustrate the book's stories.
"At Work" is a quick read that I'm guessing I'll return to several times. I really appreciate that Ms. Leibovitz has shared the human side of high-end photography. Her journey certainly has been worth reading about, and it makes for a fantastic read.
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