Photographer Annie Leibovitz is, without a doubt, best known for her portraits of celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. Still, the 58-year-old has always considered those iconic images and candid photos taken of her family and friends to be a single body of work. So it’s no surprise that a retrospective of her work, organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York, reflects that diverse artistic range.    

 

Like the artist herself, “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005,” which is on display at the Legion of Honor through May 25, doesn’t make any distinction between Leibovitz’s personal and professional lives.
   

“I don’t have two lives,” Leibovitz commented at the show’s 2006 opening in Brooklyn. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”
   

More than half of the 200-plus images are personal ones, presented in smaller format and displayed in clusters, much like family photos would be displayed in someone’s home. The clusters are interspersed throughout the exhibition with larger format images of just some of the cultural icons who have found themselves in front of Leibovitz’s lens over the year, including Nelson Mandela and John Lennon.
   

“[The exhibition] is a kind of visual diary or narrative of 15 years of Annie Leibovitz’s life,” explains Karin Breuer curator of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It is important to mention that curators at the Brooklyn Museum selected the images featured in this touring exhibition.
   

An interesting feature of the exhibition is a recreation of the pinup boards that Leibovitz used to choose images for the coffee-table-book-style catalogue that accompanies the retrospective. The pinup boards are filled with tear sheets and small prints, which allow viewers to get inside Leibovitz’s head and understand her thinking process. This segment has proven to be one of the most popular with viewers at every stop on the show’s tour.
   

Breuer expects that viewers will be surprised by the abundance of black-and-white images in the show, as Leibovitz has always been known for her creative use of color.    
   

“Also surprising to many people will probably be the oversize landscape photographs at the end of the show,” Breuer says. “Annie Leibovitz has identified landscape photography as something she’s very interested in doing now. She calls them ‘portraits of the Earth.’”
   

Breuer concedes that Leibovitz’s name will probably always be synonymous with “celebrity,” thanks to the photographer’s countless famous subjects. Still, she believes this collection of images will afford viewers a better-rounded look at Leibovitz’s work and provide them with a better understanding of Leibovitz herself.
   

“I think viewers will learn quite a bit about the life of the woman behind the camera,” Breuer adds.
   

“Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005”: through May 25; Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 34th Ave. & Clement Sts.; Tue.-Sun., 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m.; admission $10 (adults), $7 (seniors 65+), $6 (youth 13-17), free (children 12 and under); 415-750-3600, www.famsf.org.

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