Almost a year between posts is of course an indication of what I think about blog posts which isn’t very positive. Then why post a year and two days after my last post? For myself, a reminder of books read, shows I’ve seen and other things.
So to the book - At Work Phaidon, 2008 a wonderful memoir and a page turner by the amazing and prolific Ms Annie Leibovitz about her relationship with photography and people, leading us through her accounts of famous and not so famous moments of making images.
She starts at her beginning, her first adventure with her camera in Japan hiking up Mt Fuji with her Minolta SR-T 101 and barely enough film. She realized that if she was going to be a photographer then her constant companion would be a camera so she strapped it across her body and set off with her younger brother. She didn’t realize how heavy the camera would become as she climbed or just how much film she should have packed but she made it to see sunrise atop the mountain with a few frames left to record the moment.
Kendrick Lamar, The Bronx NY 2018
by Annie Leibovitz
“ I took this, my first experience with a camera on the road or path, as a lesson in determination and moderation, although it would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this think, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There wasn’t going to be any pictures without it. “
And so it goes from traveling with Hunter S Thompson to photographing Queen Elizabeth. One of our great portrait photographers believes she ‘sort of backed into’ portraiture “but it has turned out to be the mode in which I have expressed myself most fully. It has been a privilege to do this work”. Annie Liebovitz