Annie Leibovitz's Reading List
“I became a photographer because of ‘The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson,’ which was published when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute,” says Annie Leibovitz, whose latest book of photographs is “Wonderland.” “I was studying painting. Maybe it was something about the word ‘world,’ as well as the pictures, that seduced me.”
Open in WellRead Daily app →By the Book: Annie Leibovitz (2022)
NYT By the Book column (2022-01-13).
Source: www.nytimes.com
Louisa May Alcott · 1868 · Buy on Amazon
"I spent time in Ralph Waldo Emerson's library and at Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. There was some thought that I would illustrate a new edition of Little Women."
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
"Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me."
Alexandra Fuller · Buy on Amazon
"I especially like Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, about her mother."
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Buy on Amazon
"I became a photographer because of The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson, which was published when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. The pictures have been etched in my mind for over 50 years."
Sally Mann · Buy on Amazon
"Sally Mann is a great storyteller. In her memoir, Hold Still, she manages to talk about her work so that it is understandable in the context of her life."
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · Buy on Amazon
"Susan said to me that if she read as slowly as I do, she wouldn't read anything. She asked me to make a reading list, which included Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway."
Paul McCartney · Buy on Amazon
"Paul McCartney's The Lyrics, a two-volume book set that tells Paul's story through his songs. It's filled with so much life."
Favorite books (2022)
Favorite books recommended by Annie Leibovitz, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/annie-leibovitz-favorite-books/.
Source: radicalreads.com
Diane Arbus · Buy on Amazon
"This is one of the first photography books I studied closely. The portraits are very straightforward. Very direct. Simple. I usually pull back from the subject of a portrait and include things around them. I would try to figure out how Arbus got just the right amount of curtain, for instance, in a frame. Just a little piece of the curtain, but just the right amount for the room she was working in."
Richard Avedon & Truman Capote · Buy on Amazon
"Alexey Brodovitch designed Observations . Avedon had been his student and had worked with him at Harper’s Bazaar for many years. The book is a kind of apotheosis of Brodovitch’s book designs and Avedon’s photographs. It contains many of Avedon’s classic portraits: Charlie Chaplin, Marian Anderson, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Louis Armstrong, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound. Avedon seduced his subjects with conversation. He had a Rolleiflex that he would look down at and then up from. It was n..."
Alexey Brodovitch · Buy on Amazon
"This book is legendary. I think I held a copy in my hands only once. But it has to be on a list of the books that have influenced me. It is a collection of pictures made backstage and during performances in New York by the two Ballet Russe companies. The pictures were bled onto the pages. A lot of them are blurry. Brodovitch was using a medium that couldn’t really capture what was happening in front of him, but he loved the subject so much that he captured the emotion of it."
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Buy on Amazon
"There’s no photograph on the cover of Cartier-Bresson’s first book. The jacket was designed by Matisse. Cartier-Bresson selected the photographs from work he had done over the course of twenty years. I was a student when I first saw his pictures, and they made me understand what it meant to be a photographer. The camera gave you a license to go out alone into the world with a purpose."
Robert Frank · Buy on Amazon
"When I was young, I fell in love with the idea of working like Robert Frank. Driving around in a car and taking pictures. Looking for stories. In retrospect, one of the photographs in The Americans represents the way I wanted to work–the romance of the process. It’s the last photograph in the book. Frank’s wife and two small children are in the front seat of their car. It’s dawn. They’re parked across from a truck stop in Texas. You can imagine that they’ve been driving all night. The picture..."
Nan Goldin · Buy on Amazon
"Nan Goldin photographed her friends. People she knew. I admired that, but, for me, the most refreshing thing about Nan’s work was the way she used color. It was so relaxed. So intimate. So spontaneous looking. Most of the important photographers who came before her worked in black and white."
Maria Morris Hambourg · Buy on Amazon
"This book has so much in it. From the beginnings of photography in the mid-nineteenth century to just before World War II. All the possibilities of what a photograph can be."
Jaques-Henri Lartigue · Buy on Amazon
"Richard Avedon and the designer Bea Feitler put together this collection of Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s photographs of his family and friends. They included pages from Lartigue’s handwritten diaries, drawings, and quirky pictures of his life in France, starting in 1904. Diary of a Century was my favorite photography book for awhile, when I was just starting out as a photographer. When Bea told me that she and Avedon had made it up, I was disappointed, although I realize that what she meant is th..."
Alexander Liberman · Buy on Amazon
"I saw this book before I knew who Alexander Liberman was. He was the creative director of Condé Nast, but he was also a painter and sculptor in his own right. And a photographer. In this book he photographed and wrote about the places artists lived and worked. You could see them working. Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Giocometti. I love to see process."
Michael Light · Buy on Amazon
"The photographer Michael Light scanned several hundred original negatives and transparencies from the Apollo missions and made new images. Then he sequenced them into a hypothetical trip to the moon and back. The photographs were taken by astronauts, but they have an anonymous quality. I keep the compact version of the book in my children’s room. They love it."
Helmut Newton · Buy on Amazon
"Helmut was a great portrait photographer. He had a very strong point of view. I don’t necessarily like all the pictures in this book, but I admire his strong point of view. Helmut was inventive at a time when fashion photography was “safe.” He and Guy Bourdin. They pushed buttons. It’s always refreshing, for a photographer, to see buttons being pushed. White Women is a little gem. It was designed by Bea Feitler and it’s the most tasteful of Helmut’s books."
Edward Steichen & Mary Steichen Calderone · Buy on Amazon
"This is one of the first children’s books to be illustrated with photographs. It’s a charming book, with still lifes of simple objects—a teddy bear, a comb and brush, shoes and socks, a toothbrush in a glass. Steichen made it with his daughter. She wanted to interest her small children in pictures by showing them things that were part of their world."
Irving Penn · Buy on Amazon
"Irving Penn’s first book is a selection of the work he had been doing for nearly twenty years under Alexander Liberman’s direction at Vogue . Liberman wrote the introduction and Penn designed the eight “essays in photographs and words.” The photographs include some of the great Penn portraits in gray corners. And the Quechua Indian portraits from Cuzco, Peru. The portraits Penn took on expeditions to remote places of the world are some of my favorite pictures."
Alfred Stieglitz · Buy on Amazon
"Alfred Stieglitz’s nude portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe are probably my favorite pictures. They’re so intimate and sensual. You can tell that he is in love with her. There’s a give-and-take in those sittings that occurs only between lovers. You see that kind of tenderness in Edward Weston’s nudes of Charis Wilson, and in Robert Mapplethorpe’s early studies of Patti Smith, and in Imogen Cunningham’s nudes of her husband on their honeymoon on Mt. Rainier. This book is on the list because the Stie..."
Weegee · Buy on Amazon
"Diane Arbus was a great admirer of Weegee’s pictures of crime scenes and various catastrophic events. Weegee used an on-camera flash to photograph at night and in dark rooms and other places where it was impossible to rely on natural light. The flash brought out the main thing you wanted to see and also revealed moments you hadn’t anticipated. Weegee was a newspaper photographer and he didn’t care about the pictures being pretty."