Celebrate photography: Annie Leibovitz. TASCHEN Books

Annie Leibovitz

Edition of 9,000

US$ 2,500

Whoopi Goldberg, Berkeley, California, 1984
Keith Haring, New York City, 1986
David Byrne, Los Angeles, 1986
Patti Smith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1978

When Benedikt Taschen asked the most important portrait photographer working today to collect her pictures in a SUMO-sized book, she was intrigued and challenged. The project took several years to develop and proved to be revelatory. Annie Leibovitz drew from over 40 years of work, starting with the viscerally intimate reportage she created for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s and extending through the more stylized portraiture of her work for Vanity Fair and Vogue. Celebrated images such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono entwined in a last embrace are printed alongside portraits that have rarely, and sometimes never before, been seen. Annie Leibovitz was able to present some of her famous group portraits in a format that proves that she is the master of the genre. Her pictures are at once intimate and iconic, wide-ranging stylistically and also uniquely hers. Annie Leibovitz is often imitated, particularly by younger photographers, but her work is somehow immediately recognizable.

The bookends of the Leibovitz collection are the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974 and the formal color portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007. In between are portraits that make up a family album of our time: actors, dancers, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, performance artists, journalists, athletes, businesspeople. Performance and power are recurring themes. A supplementary book contains essays by Annie Leibovitz, Graydon Carter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Paul Roth and short texts describing the subjects of each of the over 250 photographs.

The Collector’s Edition is available in four different covers:

Whoopi Goldberg, Berkeley, California, 1984
Keith Haring, New York City, 1986
David Byrne, Los Angeles, 1986
Patti Smith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1978

Limited to a total of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, this book is available as Collector’s Edition (No. 1,001–10,000) and also as Art Edition (No. 1–1,000) with a fine art print, signed by Annie Leibovitz, and the full set of all four covers.

Both editions come with a tripod book stand designed by Marc Newson.

Contributors

The photographer

Annie Leibovitz’s body of work encompasses some of the most well-known portraits of our time. Leibovitz began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970 while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1983, when she joined the staff of the revived Vanity Fair, she was established as the foremost rock music photographer and an astute documentarian of the social landscape. At Vanity Fair, and later at Vogue, her work with actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and political and business figures, as well as her fashion photographs, expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life. Leibovitz has published several books and has exhibited widely. She is a Commandeur in the French government’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

The authors

Steve Martin is a celebrated comedian, actor, writer, and musician. In 2010, he published the novel An Object of Beauty.

Graydon Carter has been the editor of Vanity Fair since 1992.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include Mondialité, Conversations in Colombia, Ways of Curating, Somewhere Totally Else, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.

Paul Roth is the director of the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto.

The designer

Born in Sydney, Australia, Marc Newson studied jewelry and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts before moving to Tokyo. Now living and working in Paris and London, Newson has become one of the world’s most accomplished and influential designers.

Product details

Other editions

“More an art installation than a coffee-table tome.”

— Sotheby’s In Residence, Dubai
“If a library were a game of Happy Families, this book would be the wild joker… And because it is more a sculpture than a book, it comes with its own little table. Annie Leibovitz is something like the photographer’s triumph.”

— Die Welt, Berlin
“Intimate and sublime.”

— Madame Figaro, Paris
“A limited edition and weighty affair, it’s a beautiful object in itself…a design statement in your living room.”

— The Daily Telegraph (Luxury Supplement), London
“Precise composition, perfect framing, subtle colors and celebrated actors… A meticulously assembled volume.”

— Efe Agency, Madrid
“Cool attitude: an American aesthetic… Annie Leibovitz displays almost to excess the commercial identity of cool in this Sumo volume, which weighs a good twenty kilos. The work itself is of magnificent craftsmanship and follows a clear economic logic. Since the book market is increasingly constrained, TASCHEN is producing more expensive collectors’ editions printed in small runs and guaranteed to gain in value from day one. The 500 large-format (50 x 70 cm) pages only intensify the intrinsic qualities of Leibovitzs’ cool: a taste for stagey settings, for power, glamour, success, flamboyance and the intimate and private laid before the public.”

— L’Hebdo, Lausanne
“A fantastic portrait of our time.”

— Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich
“Leibovitz has just published an extraordinary new book of her photographs from TASCHEN… I guarantee that it will sell out quickly from New York’s Upper East Side to Beverly Hills to Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco… The pictures are sumptuous, iconic, and historic.”

— www.showbiz411.com, Los Angeles
“This book will make her immortal: Annie Leibovitz has made a selection of her best works for publication – in the mighty SUMO format… The volume, published by TASCHEN, is more than a book, it is a universe, with its very own perspective.”

— Berliner Morgenpost, Berlin
“Printed in Germany, bound in Italy, the book’s international production fits its contents, which are nothing less than 40 years’ worth of classic and iconic photography… reproduced with breathtaking clarity, texture, and vividness, the colors and subjects practically leaping off the page.”

— Vanityfair.com, Los Angeles