A photographer's life

The exhibition, "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005" includes more than 200 photographs, featuring well-known work made on editorial assignment, as well as personal photos of her family and close friends. "I don't have two lives," Leibovitz insists. "This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it."

"This is Annie Leibovitz's most ambitious exhibition yet. By showing her personal photography along with the pictures she's made that are widely known, she's challenging herself--and her audience--to find the connections that exist between private and public life," explains Paul Roth, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Leibovitz has photographed figures from American popular culture since the early 1970s, when her images began appearing in Rolling Stone. She became the magazine's chief photographer in 1973 and, 10 years later, began working for Vanity Fair, and then Vogue. In addition to her magazine images, Leibovitz has created influential advertising campaigns for American Express, Gap, Givenchy, the Milk Board, and the cable television show, "The Sopranos." "Throughout her career, from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair and Vogue, Annie Leibovitz has reinvented the modern celebrity portrait, altering the way we think about the famous people who populate our cultural landscape," Roth explains.

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The exhibit features many of Leibovitz's best-known portraits of public figures, including actors such as Jamie Foxx, Nicole Kidman, and Brad Pitt; athletes preparing for the 1996 Olympic Games; Pres. George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House; and her famous 1991 image of then-pregnant actress Demi Moore, one of the most recognizable photographs of its time.

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The show also highlights images of artists and architects such as Richard Avedon. Brice Marden. Philip Johnson. and Cindy Sherman. Leibovitz's assignment work includes reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. the election of Hillary Clinton to the U.S. Senate in 2000 and the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The artist has photographed landscapes from the American West the Jordanian desert, and the wilds of upstate New York.

At the heart of the exhibition, Leibovitz's personal photography documents intimate moments: work; the birth and childhood of her three daughters; and vacations, reunions, and rites of passage with her parents and extended family. It threads together the two sides of Leibovitz's work, chronologically and creatively, projecting a narrative of the artist's private life against the backdrop of her public image as one of America's best-known portrait photographers.

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"Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005" is on view through Jan. 13, 2008, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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