Artwork Title: Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz

Abe Frajndlich

IN the fall of 1970 I arrived at Minor White’s house for a live-in workshop. My first task was to organize his photography library. I was mesmerized by the unforgettable images. Photography has had a relatively short history, and I was struck by the fact that most of the practitioners were anonymous and unknown except to a minuscule circle. Unconsciously I must have started to dream of changing that fact, and widening that circle. More than four decades later, this work is the fruition of that dream. The saga began in 1988 when Peter Howe, the picture editor at Life magazine at the time, asked me to photograph the “grandes dames of photography,” influential figures like Berenice Abbott, Barbara Morgan, Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Ruth Bernhard. In the middle of the shootings I began to feel that Mr. Howe was exercising reverse sexism, by excluding the “old boys,” and so he gave me a green light to photograph Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Andreas Feininger, Alfred Eisenstaedt and others; I was on my way. This project has now taken more than 20 years. Photographers are never satisfied, always wanting more. This is true for the photographers pictured here, and true of me as well — always hungry for visual experience and for those rare delicacies, those few shots that, out of all the miles of exposed film, are worth printing. And now we need to add those gigabytes of digitally exposed material, and the challenge remains the same. Always easy to snap the shutter, never easy to get an image. Practicing photography for more than 40 years, I have become aware of how seldom a photograph — a truly successful photograph — is made. How easy it is to click the shutter, and how nearly impossible to seize something significant through that act. The clicks that have mattered, historically speaking, were so few and far between, even for the masters. I became intrigued with somehow following the trail and breathing the air of those who had been graced with more than one “keeper.” It became a challenge and a quest to meet and make images of the image makers. Many graciously collaborated in the process, while others were less enthused (the attitude is impressed on the film; maybe you can spot them). [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/photographing-photographers.html] Annie Leibovitz jumped into the role of professional photographer as a kid in her second year at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was friends with Jan Wenner who was starting Rolling Stone, and he said, “How’d you like to take some pictures? We’ve got something set up with John Lennon in New York. Come with me.” Her portrait of John Lennon was on the first issue of Rolling Stone, and she was off and running. You can’t avoid coming to terms with Annie. She’s a powerhouse, but she wasn’t easy to work with, and I’ve heard endless tales about her mistreatment of her assistants. When I took these pictures, Annie was certainly not easy. We had called her studio to arrange a session, and she agreed to it. I was coming back from London and our appointment was a few hours after I got back. I had just landed when I got a call from her studio saying, “Can you come an hour earlier?” My response was, “You know, I’ve been on a plane since dawn in London. I really need to go home and take a shower, just in courtesy to Ms. Leibovitz.” They said, “No, she needs to see you now.” But I went home anyway and arrived at her studio at the time that w’d arranged—not an hour earlier. She wasn’t pleased. She knew my work because she had worked for the Allgemeine before I did and they were sending her weekly copies. Her first comment was, “I’m not going to do any of your crazy stuff for you.” I said, “Hey, that’s up to you. We’re supposed to do a story together. If you don’t want to do any stuff at all for me, that’s okay too.” “What do you want from me?”... [https://www.featureshoot.com/2012/08/abe-frajndlich-tells-of-photographing-a-difficult-annie-leibovitz/]
Uploaded on Jan 2, 2018 by Suzan Hamer

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