Annie Leibovitz weighs in with her own SUMO
When Benedikt Taschen asked the most important portrait photographer working today to collect her pictures in a SUMO-sized book, she was intrigued and challenged. The project took several years to develop and proved to be revelatory.
Annie Leibovitz drew from over 40 years of work, starting with the viscerally intimate reportage she created for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s and extending through the more stylized portraiture of her work for
Vanity Fair and
Vogue. Celebrated images such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono entwined in a last embrace are printed alongside portraits that have rarely, and sometimes never before, been seen. Annie Leibovitz was able to present some of her famous group portraits in a format that proves that she is the master of the genre. Her pictures are at once intimate and iconic, wide-ranging stylistically and also uniquely hers. Annie Leibovitz is often imitated, particularly by younger photographers, but her work is somehow immediately recognizable.
The bookends of the Leibovitz collection are the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974 and the formal color portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007. In between are portraits that make up a family album of our time: actors, dancers, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, performance artists, journalists, athletes, businesspeople. Performance and power are recurring themes.
A supplementary book contains essays by Annie Leibovitz, Graydon Carter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Paul Roth and short texts describing the subjects of each of the over 250 photographs.
The Collector’s Edition is available in four different covers:
- Whoopi Goldberg, Berkeley, California, 1984
- Keith Haring, New York City, 1986
- David Byrne, Los Angeles, 1986
- Patti Smith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1978
Limited to a total of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, this book is available as Collector’s Edition (No. 1,001–10,000) and also as an Art Edition (No. 1–1,000) with a fine art print, signed by Annie Leibovitz, and the full set of all four covers.
Both editions come with a tripod book stand designed by Marc Newson.
The photographer
Annie Leibovitz’s body of work encompasses some of the most well-known portraits of our time. Leibovitz began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970 while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1983, when she joined the staff of the revived Vanity Fair, she was established as the foremost rock music photographer and an astute documentarian of the social landscape. At Vanity Fair, and later at Vogue, her work with actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and political and business figures, as well as her fashion photographs, expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life. Leibovitz has published several books and has exhibited widely. She is a Commandeur in the French government’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
The authors
Steve Martin is a celebrated comedian, actor, writer, and musician. In 2010, he published the novel An Object of Beauty.
Graydon Carter has been the editor of Vanity Fair since 1992.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows.
Paul Roth is the director of the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto.
The designer of the bookstand
Born in Sydney, Australia, Marc Newson studied jewelry and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts before moving to Tokyo. Now living and working in London, Newson has become one of the world’s most accomplished and influential designers. He has forged innovative partnerships with brands such as Apple, Nike, Dom Pérignon, and Louis Vuitton, and his work has been featured at The Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Centre Pompidou, among others.
