ALTHOUGH THE ART GALLERIES are gradually encroaching on the car workshops, the neighbourhood to which Annie Leibovitz moved her New York studio in the mid-Nineties is still an area of rough artisan graft. And nowhere, I imagine, are the working days tougher than in the Leibovitz factory itself. This vast converted garage on the Manhattan West Side, filled with props (a dilapidated gondola, for example, on which she’s just pictured the
Sopranos cast floating down the Styx), tense young assistants and Apple Macs. Dominating it is Leibovitz, 54, six foot, hippie-haired, black- clad — the world’s wittiest and highest-paid portrait photographer, who is about to bring to London an astonishing exhibition that reveals the back-breaking underside of the showbiz world that she is famous for glossing up.
I am placed on a chair in the corner of a room, in proximity to Leibovitz but not so as to stray into her eye line. The sleeves of her jersey pulled industriously up to her elbows, she is tutoring a digital retoucher on how to enhance an American Vogue shoot she’s done featuring Gérard Depardieu and the model Gisele. “If you have trouble with the floor and need to put her shoes on, put her shoes on,” she says. Since Gisele was shot shod and unshod, there is nothing exactly dishonest about this fiddling, but clearly developing pictures has come a long way since I last went to Boots. Leibovitz, I perceive, runs a renaissance artist’s workshop, a place of collaborative toil. I just wonder if there was any more laughter in Titian’s.
In the reception area a little drama is also developing. Elliott Erwitt, a Magnum photo agency veteran whom The Times has hired to photograph her, is being turned away. Leibovitz’s people have intuited that Annie does not want to be shot today but have failed to guess how badly this will go down with Erwitt, a much respected 75-year-old whose reportage dates back to the Korean War. I nip out to offer my apologies; perhaps we’ll work together another time. “Not with her, we won’t,” he says. “I only get f***ed for free once. Second time you’ve got to kiss me.”
“Right,” says Leibovitz, kissing her computer guy farewell and turning to me. “Come upstairs with me, young man.” I have a strong premonition of myself as dead meat on her developing tray, when, passing her desk, I remark on a picture of a beautiful, wide-eyed, cupid-mouthed little girl. Is that her baby? An invisible masseuse descends upon our encounter and the tension melts from its shoulders.
On a noticeboard in the loft are pictures of the other woman in Leibovitz’s life: her long-term partner Susan Sontag, otherwise known as America’s most intelligent woman. The pictures run in chronological order. The first, with the trademark streak of white in Sontag’s hair, was taken some time after they met when Leibovitz was taking her portrait in 1990. The second dates from the late Nineties after she has lost most of her hair to radiotherapy; what is left is snowy white. Finally, there is a recent, romantic shot of her, a long-tressed brunette.
“She came through,” says Leibovitz of Sontag’s cancer. “She’s OK. She’s going to live longer than any of us. She has more energy than anyone I know. She is an amazing, amazing person.” Weirder things happen in Manhattan than the coming together of great woman writer and great woman photographer. When Sarah Margaret was born two and a bit years ago the gossips did go a little mad, however, announcing that the couple had had a baby together. A rumour that the biological father was Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, was quashed only when Leibovitz’s mother, Marilyn, told everyone to stop being silly: her daughter had conceived by means of a good old-fashioned sperm bank. In fact, as becomes clear, Annie is a single parent, albeit a privileged one able to employ both a weekday and weekend nanny, although neither lives in.
Does Susan babysit? “No, Susan loves Sarah and me and they hang out a lot and they have dates.” But she doesn’t call her “Mommy”? “What? No. Susan and I are really just really, great, great friends but we don’t live together.” (They share the same apartment block in the West Village but not the same apartment.)
Leibovitz was 24 when she became Rolling Stone magazine’s chief photographer and only a year older when she rode out on Nixon’s helicopter as he fled the White House. In 1975 she toured America with the Rolling Stones and produced one of Jagger’s most famous pictures, the one of a grimacing, etiolated Jumping Jack Flash wrestling his microphone. In 1980 she photographed John Lennon naked, a few hours before his assassination.
Her fame was already assured when she joined Vanity Fair in 1983 and began two decades of fantastical magazine cover shoots: Demi Moore nude and pregnant; Sly Stallone as Rodin’s Thinker; Sharon Stone cupping her naked breasts. Although there have always been famous woman photographers (Sarah’s middle name is Cameron, after Julia Margaret Cameron), her position as a woman ringmaster of this circus intrigued. Interviewers, who might have wanted to know how many models David Bailey slept with, asked her if she regretted not being a mother. Her reply was always that it might not be too late.
“And it was the 99th hour. It is just amazing. Definitely the clichés are all true. I was almost resigned that it wasn’t going to happen and then I had just a wonderful doctor who I was having my annual check-up with and he just said, ‘You know you can do this!” And I was 49 and I said, ‘I don’t know’, but in the next two years I had Sarah. You know, I wish I was a little younger and had more energy. It’s just incredible, but it is a lot of work and it has just been a huge adjustment.”
She writes in an essay accompanying American Music, her new show, that the project became a way of life for four years. How did she manage that with a baby?
“Well, you don’t! You downright don’t. Sarah went on a few shoots. She was there on the Dolly Parton shoot. It was very sweet because Dolly Parton really loved her and — well, it sort of put things in perspective. We just had a nice day and then we took some pictures. And it was more like being back in life as opposed to a photoshoot. Sarah has sort of done that for me. Brought me back to life. Although life can be a photoshoot and photoshoots can be life.” While Sarah has changed her working practice — shorter trips to LA, longer spells with Sarah in Paris to beat baby jetlag — Sontag, the author of 1977’s revered monograph On Photography, has affected the work itself. Leibovitz, because of her height, fame and distinction, can intimidate, but she did not intimidate Sontag. An early “compliment” Sontag paid her was that she “could” be good.
“But that was so endearing to me and beautiful. I so respect her and admire and want to please her.” Was she intimidated? “I was very intimidated by her when I first met her. I admire intelligence so much, especially right now. Everything she has been saying is so right on. Especially her recent book on war photography and its impact. She is just a very important person of the world. I am definitely a very small, tiny person in the world and I learn hopefully a little from her. She is a great woman.”
