Annie Leibovitz

As a child, Air Force brat Annie Leibovitz moved extensively with her family, with the car window framing much of the world she saw. As a Navy brat, myself, who went to 11 different schools in 12 years, I also saw the world (albeit in a blur) through a car window. Flash forward. Still framing the world, Leibovitz is perhaps the highest paid photographer working today--while my frame is watching Sheep Shearing for Wooly Dummies on a 19-inch TV screen. What's wrong with this picture? In director Rebecca Frayn's engaging 1993 exposé, the famed shutterbug talks about the circumstances surrounding many of the provocative celebrity images she's created, from a nude John Lennon wrapped in the fetal position around a fully clothed Yoko Ono to the controversial Vanity Fair cover featuring Demi Moore looking like the sex kitten who ate a watermelon. Leibovitz, whose riveting, unforgettable photographic essays have literally traced popular culture for the last 20 years, discusses her career from her student days in the late '60s at the San Francisco Art Institute to becoming Rolling Stone's chief photographer in the '70s (the program features interviews with editor Jann Wenner, as well as staff writer Hunter S. Thompson, who had a somewhat stormy, intense, “pissed as hell” relationship with Leibovitz). In addition to her RS work (which included an assignment as tour photographer for Mick Jagger in 1975, a trip that left her with a drug addiction that took years to kick), Leibovitz talks about her move to Vanity Fair (and shares a lens-eye-view of Demi Moore during a laborious postnatal photo shoot) and describes her commercial success with companies such as American Express. With celebrities clamoring to pose for her, Leibovitz herself has become the star and her pictures constitute magnificent performances. Highly recommended. Aud: P. (N. Plympton)