Wonderland

Product Information

Leibovitz is the recipient of many honors. In 2006, she was made a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She has received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first Creative Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts, the Wexner Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. She has been designated a Living Legend by the United States Library of Congress. She lives in New York with her three children, Sarah, Susan and Samuelle. Though you’d think it wasn’t so, this is the photographer’s first-ever collection of fashion images; she wanted to save them all for something special, as she states in the book.

In 1975, Leibovitz served as a concert-tour photographer for The Rolling Stones' Tour of the Americas. Leibovitz started her career as a photojournalist at Rolling Stone in 1971, when the magazine was in its infancy. She was just 21 when her portrait of John Lennon made the cover. Her photographs helped shape the magazine and give it the unvarnished visual gumption it has become known for. In her 12 years at the magazine, she went on tour with the Rolling Stones, shot the final image of the Nixon presidency as the disgraced politician boarded a helicopter from the White House, and captured the iconic, much-copied image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Eventually, she concedes, “I found my way with it. But I never would have thought I’d end up in fashion.” Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz’s surprising account of her encounters with fashion over five decades. This luxury edition is presented in a beautiful and elegant slipcase.

The famous blue dress

When Leibovitz returned to America in 1970, she worked for the recently launched Rolling Stone magazine. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of Rolling Stone. Leibovitz worked for the magazine until 1983, and her intimate photographs of celebrities helped define the Rolling Stone look. The person who has been the engine for keeping the work going for almost 30 years is Anna Wintour,” Leibovitz said. “She has reassured me, guided me, and sent me off to meet subjects who I admired and really wanted to work with and subjects who I never heard of and who turned out to be amazing people. She is benevolent, tireless, sometimes inscrutable, and almost always, in the end, right—or close enough. She is the wizard of Wonderland.”

Her work is often funny, too. “My approach to fashion has always been lighthearted,” she says. She revels in its inherent whimsy. Take for example, her shoot featuring Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of “Sex and the City”, in front a mountainous pile of pillows. Or her series depicting Natalia Vodianova, a Russian model, crammed into a tiny house as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in her wonderland. A compendium of her greatest hits ... Her pictures are big, colorful, beautifully composed, egregiously luxuriant, loaded with detail, and nearly always contain some kind of implied narrative.' – The New York Times Book Review A compendium of her greatest hits ... Her pictures are big, colorful, beautifully composed, egregiously luxuriant, loaded with detail, and nearly always contain some kind of implied narrative. "– The New York Times Book ReviewEven after more than 50 years, and photoshoots with presidents, first ladies, the Dalai Lama and the Queen, Leibovitz admits to being nervous every time she takes aim. “Oh sure! Of course,” she says. “I’m always nervous.” But, she adds, “Isn’t that the fun of it? You admire and respect people, and when you work with them, that is daunting.” John Lennon, naked and wrapped around Yoko Ono, just hours before he was shot dead? Leibovitz. Demi Moore, seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing nothing but a pair of earrings? Leibovitz. Whoopi Goldberg grinning like the cat who got the cream while bathing in milk? Leibovitz again. Melania Trump, pregnant in a gold bikini, standing on the steps of her husband’s Gulfstream, Caitlyn Jenner in a blush-coloured corset, revealing her true self for the first time on the cover of Vanity Fair, Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West, embracing on the occasion of their wedding… all Leibovitz. Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer whose style is marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject.

One of the things about fashion is that models know what they’re doing and they like being photographed,” she says. “That was such a new thing for me. I felt like the dentist before that, you know, everyone hated me. To enter this world where people liked being photographed and would play along, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like I was cheating or something.” Anna Wintour, Vogue editor-in-chief since 1988, wrote the foreword, saying that “nothing is unphotographable for Annie; no request is too outlandish, too bizarre, too hard.”Now when we think of the little girl who grows, shrinks, and navigates all manner of odd encounters, we tend to imagine her in a blue dress with an Alice band. Much like Dorothy’s gingham and ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939) or Little Red Riding Hood’s, well, red hood, it’s an immediately identifiable outfit. However, the first authorised colour version of the book featured her in yellow. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Leibovitz is the third of six children in a Jewish family. Her mother was a modern dance instructor, while her father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. The family moved frequently with her father's duty assignments, and she took her first pictures when he was stationed in the Philippines.