Recently I picked up Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 from the library. I flipped quickly through the images, slightly disappointed, and set it aside to go through more slowly. Unfortunately, my new addiction to Buffy the Vampire Slayer on dvd intervened at this point, and I only picked up the heavy book again the other day. Luckily, I soon figured out that reading it at the table would save me from the surefire carpal tunnel syndrome of trying to read it on the couch.
Anyways, the other day I read the text first and then looked at all the images, and I definitely got a lot more out of them. They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but over and over again we see that words and pictures can enhance each other. That there are things pictures can’t say as well as words, and things words can’t show as well as pictures. I think I’d like to spend more time exploring ways to put words and pictures together.
A few bits that stood out for me from the text:
“There are truly intelligent photographers who work in the studio, but it’s not for me. Richard Avedon’s genius was that he was a great communicator. He pulled things out of his subjects. But I observe. Avedon knew how to talk to people. What to talk to them about. As soon as you engage someone, their face changes. They become animated. They forget about being photographed. Their minds become occupied and they look more interesting. But I’m so busy looking, I can’t talk. I never developed that gift.”
“It wasn’t a single moment. It was a flow of images, which is more like life, so we designed the book using four images across two pages quite frequently to keep this effect.”
“It seemed like a return to the kind of work I had been doing in the beginning, but I wasn’t able to go back to reportage in a completely pure way. I knew too much by then. Too much about how a picture can be set up, how you can manipulate a picture, when it should be taken.
“I’m not a journalist. A journalist doesn’t take sides, and I don’t want to go through life like that. I have a more powerful voice as a photographer if I express a point of view.”
The text makes many of these images more harrowing – for me at least. This woman lost her partner and her father within six weeks of each other.
“That summer, I moved the material for this book to Rhinebeck and set up a workshop in the barn. Rosanne Cash had given me an advance copy of her new CD, Black Cadillac, which she wrote after both her parents and her stepmother died. I would go into the barn every morning and put it on very loud and cry for ten minutes or so and then start working, editing the pictures. I cried for a month. I didn’t realize until later how far the work on the book had taken me through the grieving process. It’s the closest thing to who I am that I’ve ever done.”