Annie Leibovitz - An icon maker

picture by Martin Schoeller Annie Leibovitz is an icon maker, unerringly magnifying the images of the famous and turning them into emblems of their careers. She made her career as a photographer on the pages of Rolling Stone in the '70s and Vanity Fair in the '80s, where she accurately diagnosed celebrity fever and understood that its symptoms included an insatiable hunger for more stars. Ms. Leibovitz practically reinvented the single, storytelling portrait, using humor, corniness, oddity, boldness, silliness and sheer unexpectedness to make a photograph catch your attention instantly. The form has been widely imitated. She adapted her editorial style to Gap and American Express advertising campaigns, which introduced her images into countless living rooms. Seemingly, anyone who has ever stood in front of Ms. Leibovitz's camera takes a very favorable view of her. Her pictures do not denigrate or disparage. Instead they document the celebrity circus with an acutely literal vision, submitting the famous to playfully acrobatic postures and various acts of clownishness. John Cleese dangled himself upside down from a tree for her, Kate Winslet submerged herself in a custom-made fish tank and Clint Eastwood permitted himself to be tied up. Supplied with titanic budgets, armies of assistants to do her bidding and the willing cooperation of some of the most well-protected people on earth, Ms. Leibovitz has become possibly the most famous living photographer or portraitist in Amerca, perhaps the world. Yet in late July 2009, a lawsuit appeared to suggest that Ms. Leibovitz was less adept at handling money than images. An art finance company that lent the photographer $24 million against every photo she has ever taken — and against the value of her homes in Manhattan and Rhinebeck, N.Y. — filed a breach of contract lawsuit against her in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Charging that she had engaged in "boldly deceptive conduct," the company, Art Capital Group, asked the court to order the photographer to allow real estate agents to enter her townhouses in Greenwich Village so they could be sold to pay her debts. Art Capital Group, a lender, used the rights to her photos and her real estate as collateral. In March 2010, the photographer reached an agreement with Colony Capital to help her restructure her debt. Under the deal, Colony — which manages about $30 billion in assets, mostly in real estate — became Ms Leibovitz’s only creditor and helped her market her catalog of celebrity-heavy photographs. Colony, which also controls the rights to the Neverland Ranch in California, said it plans to manage sales of Ms. Leibovitz’s photographic holdings and pursue other business ventures for her so that she can concentrate on her career. Ms. Leibovitz reportedly earns $3 million a year for her magazine work for Vanity Fair and Vogue and tens of thousands of dollars daily for commercial shoots. She appeared to have experienced financial challenges, facing a lengthy and litigious renovation on three adjoining town houses she bought on West 11th Street in Manhattan, federal and state tax liens of more than $1.4 million, and lawsuits from a lighting company and a stylist she had hired, asking for a total of more than $700,000. Her photographic career began when, as a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970, she took a night class in photography. Soon enough, she sent some of her work — including a strikingly beautiful picture of a group of ladders, taken in an apple orchard on an Israeli kibbutz — to Robert Kingsbury, then the art director of Rolling Stone, who hired her right away. Reportage was the idiom of the day and Ms. Leibovitz traveled around the country with writers like Hunter S. Thompson chronicling the sublime messiness of the era. It was through the world of music specifically that her own fame was consecrated. In 1975, she went on tour with the Rolling Stones, capturing weeks of strung-out nights and unmade beds. She photographed Sly Stone speeding down Highway 5 and Tammy Wynette holding a baby she didn't seem to know what to do with. By the late 1970's, the imprimatur of cool had stuck to her so irrevocably that her subjects began to come to her, ready to perform however she might deem fit. Susan Sontag, who died of cancer in 2004, was Ms. Leibovitz's partner for 15 years. It was Ms. Sontag, Ms. Leibovitz has explained, who prodded her to produce work that would matter. Fonte/Source:http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/annie_leibovitz/index.html?scp=2&sq=painting%20exposition&st=cse