Wonderland

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Glamour is worth documenting, she believes. Her subjects—whether they be politicians (such as Hillary Clinton), pop-stars (like Lady Gaga), or activists (including Malala Yousafzai)—are captured in an unnervingly realistic way. At the same time, they radiate under the dramatic light she casts over them, enhanced by a glow reminiscent of the chiaroscuro technique used by Renaissance painters.

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.” 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 Leibovitz is the recipient of many honors. In 2006, she was made a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She has received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first Creative Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, the Wexner Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. She has been designated a Living Legend by the United States Library of Congress. She lives in New York with her three children, Sarah, Susan and Samuelle. 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 Leibovitz’s new book, Wonderland, would suggest otherwise. A smaller, slimmer volume than her other works (“I really did want something you could rest on your lap,” she says wryly), it is a celebration of her fashion photographyHer 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. 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. Eventually, she concedes, “I found my way with it. But I never would have thought I’d end up in fashion.” 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.

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.” In 1975, Leibovitz served as a concert-tour photographer for The Rolling Stones' Tour of the Americas. 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:To say this week is an exciting one for the fashion industry would be an understatement. There is much to celebrate, and high on that list is the release of the book Annie Leibovitz: Wonderland (Phaidon) which was the reason that a notable group gathered at Hauser & Wirth’s pop-up show at Studio 525 in Chelsea yesterday afternoon. In the late 1970s, editor Clay Felker approached her to shoot the model Margaux Hemingway for New West, a Californian spin-off of New York Magazine. It was her first brush with fashion and, says Leibovitz, a revelation.

In 2007 Ms Leibovitz became the first American to officially photograph Queen Elizabeth II and her family. Research is integral to this kind of assignment, she says. “I cannot afford to go into the shoot without a plan.” She views her subjects as creative partners and the final images as a reflection of that relationship. But they will always be a kind of fiction, she admits, despite the immediacy and realism of photography. It will never be possible to capture “the full complexity of a subject” in a single shot. “You can only get ten percent of a person in an image.” ■ Vogue and Vanity Fair would like to extend a special thanks to Hauser & Wirth, Phaidon, Hyundai, TriNet, and The Macallan for supporting our event. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Leibovitz is the third of six children in a Jewish family. Her mother was a modern dance instructor, while her father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. The family moved frequently with her father's duty assignments, and she took her first pictures when he was stationed in the Philippines.A] gorgeous anthology of fashion images … Leibovitz is nothing less than America’s greatest living photographic portraitist … she has changed fashion photography forever.”– Anna Wintour 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. 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. 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. John Lennon, naked and wrapped around Yoko Ono, just hours before he was shot dead? Leibovitz. Demi Moore, seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing nothing but a pair of earrings? Leibovitz. Whoopi Goldberg grinning like the cat who got the cream while bathing in milk? Leibovitz again. Melania Trump, pregnant in a gold bikini, standing on the steps of her husband’s Gulfstream, Caitlyn Jenner in a blush-coloured corset, revealing her true self for the first time on the cover of Vanity Fair, Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West, embracing on the occasion of their wedding… all Leibovitz.