“I don’t have two lives,” Leibovitz says. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Sponsored by American Express, the exhibition will be on view at the Corcoran from October 13, 2007 through January 13, 2008.
“"This is Annie Leibovitz's most ambitious exhibition yet. By showing her personal photography along with the pictures she's made that are widely known, she's challenging herself–and her audience–to find the connections that exist between private and public life,” said Paul Roth, Corcoran curator of photography and media arts.
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 features many of Leibovitz’s best-known portraits of public figures, including actors such as Jamie Foxx, Nicole Kidman and Brad Pitt; athletes preparing for the 1996 Olympic Games; George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House; and her famous 1991 image of then-pregnant actress Demi Moore, one of the most recognizable photographs of its time.
The show also highlights images of artists and architects such as Richard Avedon, Brice Marden, Philip Johnson and Cindy Sherman. Leibovitz’s assignment work includes reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, the election of Hillary Clinton to the U.S. Senate, and the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The artist has photographed landscapes from the American West, the Jordanian desert and the wilds of upstate New York, and these are featured prominently.
"Throughout her career, from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair and Vogue, Annie Leibovitz has reinvented the modern celebrity portrait, altering the way we think about the famous people who populate our cultural landscape," Roth said.
At the heart of the exhibition, Leibovitz’s personal photography documents intimate moments, work; the birth and childhood of her three daughters; and vacations, reunions and rites of passage with her parents and extended family. Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 threads together the two sides of Leibovitz’s work both chronologically and creatively, projecting a narrative of the artist’s private life against the backdrop of her public image as one of America’s best-known portrait photographers. -- www.corcoran.org
