The artist tells Tatler about the times she would drive up to Waterbury, Connecticut often from New York, or wherever she was sent on assignment by Rolling Stone, to visit her grandmother who lived by herself. “She had a real inner life,” Leibovitz says. “She always had a chicken boiling on the stove, and a sewing machine in her bedroom, she sewed all the time.” To this day, the photographer’s favourite pictures are those of her family. “I used to say to young photographers, stay close to home, photograph people who put up with you and love you.”

Being based in New York and working for Rolling Stone magazine provided Leibovitz ample opportunity to seek out celebrity subjects and cultural icons, including Andy Warhol.

“I remember living in New York in the Seventies, and he [Warhol] was always around, he would be at everything; I remember wondering how could he be at everything?” With a camera grasped in his hand, seemingly on the verge of snapping a shot, this image of the artist became one of Leibovitz’s most recognised. “That was at The Factory,” she says referring to Warhol’s infamous studio known for housing wild parties as much as being the artist’s prime site for art production. “We were just messing around, it wasn’t a structured shoot, he was very playful.”

Roughly two decades later in 1998, Leibovitz was approached by Anna Wintour to shoot for Vogue magazine. “What’s interesting about entering this portal [fashion],” she says, “is that they [fashion editors] come in as very respectful to the photographer and looks at them as an artist who can develop the story.” Leibovitz had always considered narrative as a defining factor of her practice, and she was now able to apply that to staged fashion shoots. “I like to have an idea of what I’m going to do,” say Leibovitz of her creative process, adding that she was inspired by a very specific type of story: “the fairy tales in particular have wonderful structure to them”, she says.

Finding creative resonance in the likes of Narnia and Wonderland, Leibovitz infused her fashion photography with fantastical visuals inspired by the tales. The Alice in Wonderland series, for example, featured model Natalia Vodianova as Alice in different designer creations, often with the corresponding designer playing a character from the tale. The inspiration here, for instance, is John Tenniel’s 19th-century illustrations of the story as inspiration.

Context and narrative form the basis of Leibovitz’s work, and helped hone her sense of portraiture, bringing out the essence of character, as exemplified in a series of photograph featuring Sarah Jessica Parker in New York.

The current exhibition, which has become a retrospective of sorts, gives Leibovitz a moment to reflect on the breadth of her practice, “Creating this show was an exercise in going through all of my work; it was a river of work.”

She hopes, too, that her legacy will inspire those who see the exhibitions, especially those hoping to follow in her footsteps. “It’s important to me that the audience sees what it took to be a young photographer, to be obsessed, to be in it—to photograph every day.”

Annie Leibovitz’s The Early Years, 1970-1983, Archive Project No. 1 and Wonderland at Hauser Wirth runs from 6 Jan 2022 – 12 Feb 2022

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