Annie Leibovitz: On a Personal Note

Of course you know Annie Leibovitz. Those celebrity magazine covers—Brad, Demi, and Uma. They lauded her in your art classes and you might even have one of her books on your coffee table. But you’ve never, I’ve never, met Annie like this. Though she likes to insist that it’s impossible to capture a person’s essence on camera, her latest exhibition comes as close as possible to the artist herself.

Press passes are awesome. Her newest exhibit had come to town: Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005, and we press people were invited to check it out before it opened, uh, with Annie on hand to lead us through the rooms. Wowza.

She walked into our Legion of Honor museum (a neo-classical palace of art high on a foggy, Golden Gate Bridge-viewed hill), so unassumingly dressed—wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black pants, and blue Nike tennis shoes with bright red swooshes on them—that if socialite to-be-reckoned-with Dede Wilsey (bejeweled in a green cocktail suit at 9 a.m.?) hadn’t made such a fuss over her, you might think Annie was one of us four-eyed press folk. And she was a total press subject’s subject—appreciative, candid, and generously unhurried.

As the eloquent Fine Arts Museum Director, John Buchanan, said of her work: “I see my own life flash before my eyes of the last twenty-five years, those who shape our lives everyday, but through her own voice. The eye of a painter is one of her lenses if you will excuse the pun.”

Okay, I’m going to stop talking now and let Annie (First name basis? Only because she was sooo friendly to us) do the rest, although I must gush that this reporter’s favorite photographs from the show were the one of Leonardo DiCaprio with the swan, the William S. Burroughs series, the photo of the orphaned Sarajevo bicycle with the smear of blood on the pavement, that one of Annie’s mother we’ll discuss later, the White Stripes in a circus, R2-D2, the one of Patti Smith and her kids, and the one of Annie’s totally hot brother. Enjoy!