A Photographer's Life

by Annie Leibovitz

First published 2009

Annie Leibovitz presents fifteen years of her photography from 1990 to 2005, refusing to separate her professional assignments from her personal documentation. The collection weaves together her iconic portraits of celebrities like Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Michael Jordan, and Nelson Mandela with intimate photographs of her own family and friends. Leibovitz includes her reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s alongside quiet landscapes and domestic scenes. The photographer chronicles a long relationship that concludes with illness and death, captures the joys and sorrows of her extended family, and documents becoming a mother herself. Throughout these years, her commercial work and private photography inform each other, creating a visual autobiography where public assignments echo the emotional rhythms of her personal life. The book demonstrates how a photographer's professional vision grows from lived experience, showing that artistic work and intimate relationships cannot be separated into distinct categories.

Genres: biography, art, autobiography, photography

Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking

Tropes: found-family

Setting: Sarajevo

Period: 1990-2005

472 pages · Paperback · Random House Trade Paperbacks

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