As a wonderful surprise, I ended up at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Friday to see the new exhibition entitled 'Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005', which documents the New York-based (I like her already) portrait photographer's life through a selected number of photographs from both her professional and personal collection.
I have to say with a love of photography (though no skills as of yet), I really enjoyed it. If you don't know of her you will have probably stumbled across her work at some point - she is best known for her work for Vanity Fair, Vogue and Rolling Stone Magazine and her work with public figures such as George Bush as well as celebrities such as a theatrical Nicole Kidman and a landscape, simplistic black and white Al Pacino portrait, as well as what is probably her most well known work - a naked portrait of the heavily pregnant Demi Moore. I also found out she took the last professional photograph of John Lennon for the cover of Rolling Stone just five hours before he was shot and killed.
My personal favourites included Johnny Cash and his family on his porch - just for naturalness and colour and an awesome panoramic view from the skies over Jordan.
I read somewhere that her work has been described as too staged, contrived even. My personal opinion is that, yes that is her style however, I think the beauty of the exhibition was in the contrast of these staged, theatrical photographs, with the intimate photographs of her personal life depicting everything from the birth of her children to the death of both her father and her close friend Susan Sontag.
Whatever your opinion, I highly recommend you check it out - it's on until the 1st February 2009.
Kisses, ZsuZsi xx
http://www.npg.org.uk/annieleibovitz/exhib.htm
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