At O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch house, Leibovitz photographed the small red hill that so often appeared as a monumental symbol of the American Southwest in O’Keeffe’s paintings. On a visit to Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, New Mexico, Leibovitz photographed the skeleton of a rattlesnake encased in a glass coffee table. Leibovitz photographed the pressed flowers of Emily Dickinson’s childhood herbarium and the worn surface of Virginia Woolf’s writing desk.
#ANNIE LEIBOVITZ PORTRAITS SERIES#
This new work is shown alongside a selection of images from a series Leibovitz was working on before the pandemic interrupted our lives, in which Leibovitz explored a different sort of portrait-based photography instead of photographing a person’s face and body, she focused on the details found in the interiors, studios and work places of figures from history whom, Leibovitz says, “mean something to her.” It was, she says, “a project for myself.” Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Rattlesnake skeleton in Georgia O'Keeffe's living room, Abiquiu (2010) © Annie Leibovitz. They are more a response to this moment." Are these new pictures even photographs? I don’t know. A fish dropped by a heron whose lunch we interrupted. “Pieces of a puzzle based on the Waterhouse painting of the Lady of Shalott that my daughter is working on. The exhibition shows Leibovitz’s newfound focus on deeply intimate still life studies photographs of serendipitous compositions, taken in and around her own home in upstate New York that seem to somehow say something about Leibovitz’s experience of being confined during lockdown.
For a new Hauser & Wirth Dispatches online exhibition (launching today at 3pm), the US photographer reflects on how the Covid-19 pandemic has forced her to depart from the portraiture-based work she has always been known for. Now, Annie Leibovitz has been forced to do something radically different.
By asking Demi Moore to pose nude and pregnant and by convincing John Lennon to take all his clothes off before embracing in the foetus position his wife Yoko Ono. And caking Lauren Hutton in the Mississippi mud. She made her name by submerging Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk.