Annie Leibovitz’s famous portraits in book installation

Annie Leibovitz releases sumo-sized book of her famous work

Annie Leibovitz, the most important portrait photographer working today, has released a book that is “not really a book.” Designed to sit on a tripod stand and of “sumo” size, the work is more like an “installation”.

“You can find a photograph that you care about and leave the book open to that and sort of dwell on it,” Leibovitz told TASCHEN, who produced the book.

“It’s hard to design a book that is not really a book. Everyone who worked on this built it as a book while trying to understand it as an installation. I’m not sure we succeeded completely, but we tried. This is not a book that you’re going to put in your lap. You’re going to look at it from a distance. One picture at a time.”

Drawing from over 40 years of work, the book includes work from Leibovitz’s time at Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. But she says that she didn’t want anyone to “look at the book and call it a retrospective.”

“This is not a retrospective. It is a kind of potpourri. A roller coaster. As you go through it, you forget what you saw in the beginning. You’re in another place toward the end.”

The bookends are a black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974 and the formal colour portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007.

Production of the book is limited to a total of 10,000 signed and numbered copies.