This is probably not something I should admit here, but I didn’t really know who Annie Leibovitz is until that video of her shooting the Queen made the rounds on the web a while back (just google it if you’re interested). I’d heard her name of course, but when I heard it, my brain exchanged her name with Anne Geddes and made me cringe involuntarily. But I know very well who she is now, and I’ve seen enough of her pictures to know that it bears not even the slightest resemblance to the babies in pea suits pictures.

Last weekend I picked up Annie Leibovitz’s At Work, and I’m quite enjoying it. Halfway in, here are a few things that I’d like to share:

“I was in awe of Robert Frank. Here was the great master. I couldn’t believe that I was able to watch him work for a few days, that I was actually in the room where Robert Frank was loading his camera. He picked up my camera once. I was terrified. He held it. It was like being with God. He said to me, ‘You can’t get every picture.’ That was comforting advice. You do miss things. [...] Robert Frank didn’t seem to be missing anything, though. He was tireless. He never stopped working.”

“I wasn’t thinking about any of this at the time, of course. I was just throwing up a light haphazardly and hoping the picture would come out.”

“It was a popular picture, and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. [...] There are different criteria for magazine covers. They’re simple. The addition of type doesn’t destroy them. Sometimes they even need type. My best photographs are inside the magazine.”

“I’m always perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured someone. A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.”