‘I often wish my pictures had more of an edge’

A new exhibition of Annie Leibovitz’s earliest work reveals the world’s most famous celebrity portraitist in a new light. Gaby Wood reports

At an hour approaching midnight in the south of France, a crowd of thousands gathered in a Roman amphitheatre in order to listen to a certain “Madame Leibovitz” give a lecture. The annual Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in Arles has a gift for grandeur – many of its attendees wouldn’t have looked out of place in Hearst Castle during its heyday – and when a black-and-white photograph appeared on a vast screen, the image seemed to merge with its ancient surroundings. The photograph was of the ruins in Petra; stone met stone; at the centre was a small human silhouette. Then a live woman appeared and stood in front of it. She was wearing all black, and was about the size of the figure in the picture. The effect was like a reflection. But the photograph was not of the American photographer Annie Leibovitz, who had just been met with loud applause in the amphitheatre; it was of her lover, Susan Sontag, who died in 2004. Leibovitz told the crowd she hadn’t been to Arles since 1986. She glanced at the giant image behind her. Then her voice tumbled over itself, and she began to sob.

Annie Leibovitz has two selves. Well, at least two; two that are discernible to the outside observer. There’s the portraitist to the stars – a modern-day Gainsborough or Sargent, presenting to the public eye a sequence of beautiful women in long dresses (a cover of Vanity Fair magazine being the contemporary equivalent of an unveiling at the Royal Academy or the Paris Salon). And there’s the humble, heartfelt documentarian, who traces lives with subtlety and understanding.

The first of these two selves is Leibovitz the legend: fierce, demanding, extravagant, beset by legal troubles. The resulting photographs – predominantly published in the US magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair – have a kind of theatrical formality about them that has become her stock-in-trade. The photos tend to be dark – this Leibovitz likes a deep, stormy blue, and is often at loggerheads with her editors about brightening the tone. Up close, they can look a little dead: human faces greyer than they are in life, as if beneath the skin there were a skeleton of steel.

Yet Leibovitz’s other self has never been shy of criticising that one. I have interviewed her twice, and on both occasions she has not exactly renounced her more staged magazine work, but she has certainly been more interested in her other pictures. Her career began in 1970, in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine, and for the whole of that decade her work was mainly composed of black-andwhite photojournalistic images, taken with a slightly wide lens on a 35mm camera. The picture-taking was swift, embedded, often affectionate: hers was a view both privileged and proletarian. Leibovitz always seemed to be part of the gang, whether that gang was the Rolling Stones on tour or Hunter S Thompson on the presidential campaign trail, or her own peripatetic family on the road. That she took as many pictures of people driving as she did is emblematic: Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Pryor – Leibovitz was right beside them in the passenger seat, on whatever their adventure turned out to be.

At first, the road provided a way of seeing, and of being: she could travel to reporting assignments, as she always had with her parents and siblings, and the windscreen or window provided a frame much like a viewfinder. The first picture Leibovitz took that made her think she could become a photographer was taken through the window of a car. It was a beach scene, intersected by a half-open car door. It suggested two views: the frame within the frame provided by the car window, and the beach beyond, past the edge of the door, as if liberated from its restricted embrace. “It was a little complicated,” Leibovitz recalls in the catalogue to a new exhibition in Arles. “It was an idea.”

Later, when she began to take portraits for Vanity Fair, she became nervous of the nondocumentary approach required. If people were going to just turn up at a location for the purposes of portraiture, she had to invent scenarios in order to get something to happen: Bette Midler drowning in roses; Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk; the Blues Brothers with their faces painted blue.

The new exhibition at Arles is about the build-up to that moment, everything before the birth of artifice. Held by the LUMA Foundation, which has acquired Leibovitz’s archive, it is the first show of many planned there to display Leibovitz’s work, and covers the years 1970 to 1983. At the amphitheatre the night before it opened, its curator Matthieu Humery asked Leibovitz whether she felt, looking back, that she was the same photographer then as she is now. “I think of that early work as more like sketching,” she replied. Then she added that she saw “a beauty and a drive” in them that suggested it was “a young man’s art”. In retrospect, she did think something had been lost. “I often wish my pictures had more of an edge,” she said, “but that’s not the kind of photographer I have come to be”. What there was, instead of commentary or bite, she reflected, was “an accumulation”.

That’s certainly what the exhibition seeks to show – not a curator’s selection but a restless eye. The images are printed on plain paper, their digital file names – JPEGs or TIFFs – clearly showing so they appear to be works in progress, the author stacking up her own work for reflection and consideration, rather than actual archival matter. There are no vintage prints, there is no ephemera. It’s very unlike a museum, and much more like a studio wall, each image pinned to a beige-coloured board, until the accumulation itself becomes a document.

Some sitters recur over time – especially Leibovitz’s colleagues or friends or family: her parents and sisters; Norman Mailer; Hunter S Thompson; Jane Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone. That is its own form of accumulation – the build-up of a relationship. Others are clusters of pictures gathered on a particular day – Tammy Wynette pulling a large sheet of tin foil out of its box, then driving; Truman Capote in close-up, over several frames. In this way, the exhibition itself becomes a portrait – of the times rather than of individuals.

Leibovitz had addressed the question of accumulation before. Years ago, when I met her to talk

‘I think of those early shots as more like sketching – a young man’s art’