Benaroya Hall Calendar

Seattle Arts & Lectures: Annie Leibovitz

Nov. 19, 2008 7:30 PM

S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium


2008-09 Season Special Event Series

This lecture is sponsored in part by:
Goldman Sachs & Co.
Reed, Longyear, Malnati & Ahrens, PLLC


Annie Leibovitz was studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970 when she signed up for a night class in photography. Not long after, she shot a photograph of some ladders in an apple orchard, sent the image to Robert Kingsbury, then the art director of Rolling Stone, and was hired immediately and quickly promoted to chief photographer. In 1975 she went on the road with the Rolling Stones, photographing Sly Stone, Tammy Wynette, and the life of rock n' roll on the open road. By the end of the decade she was irrevocably cool.

In 1983 Leibovitz moved from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair and in 1998 added Vogue to her resumé. Larger budgets gave her significantly more leeway to conceive her imagination's desires, and with them she shot the luminaries of the time in settings of intense and informal glamour. Movie stars, artists, athletes and politicians have all come under her gaze, and in each image she has revealed something between nothing and everything. "I don't mind doing something obvious," she said in an interview with the New York Times. "I'm not looking for the ultimate image, the ultimate essence of someone. The chances of that happening are far and few between." What she sets up, time and again, are images that bring the viewer into some sort of intimacy with the subject, even if only imagined: John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono; Demi Moore naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair; Bruce Springsteen's backside; Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk.

In addition to her magazine editorial work, Leibovitz has created advertising campaigns for American Express, the Gap, Givenchy, The Sopranos, and the Milk Board. She has exhibited widely, and her journalistic and personal work has been collected in six books: Photographs, Photographs 1970-1990, Olympic Portraits (from the Atlanta games), Women, American Music, and A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005, a catalog for the traveling exhibit that debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2006.

(Source: Seattle Arts & Lectures)


Tickets: (206) 621-2230, Lectures.org: $25-60 adult, $10 student/under 25
On-sale Date: Tickets are currently on sale.




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Scott Simon | Mar. 18
Shirin Ebadi | May 19