POSTED: 19 DECEMBER 2010

Sydney's MCA hosts major Leibovitz exhibition

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is the exclusive Australian venue for the exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, which opened on 19 November following a record-breaking tour of the US and Europe, and will continue until 27 March.

“We are thrilled to be presenting this important exhibition by one of the world’s most celebrated photographers,” said MCA Director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor.

“It offers Australians a rare opportunity to see a world-renowned collection of images, from famous public figures to intimate family portraits. ”

Annie Leibovitz is without a doubt one of the most celebrated photographers of our time. The exhibition brings together almost 200 iconic images of famous public figures together with personal photographs of her family and close friends. Arranged chronologically, they project a unified narrative of the artist’s private life against the backdrop of her public image.

“I don’t have two lives,” Leibovitz says. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”

At the heart of the exhibition, Leibovitz’s personal photography documents scenes from her life, including the birth and childhood of her three daughters, and vacations, reunions, and rites of passage with her parents, her extended family and close friends.

The exhibition features Leibovitz’s portraits of well-known figures, including actors such as Jamie Foxx, Daniel Day Lewis, Demi Moore, Scarlett Johansson, Al Pacino, Nicole Kidman and Brad Pitt, as well as artists and architects such as Richard Avedon, Brice Marden, Philip Johnson, Chuck Close and Cindy Sherman.

Featured assignment work includes searing reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and the election of Hillary Clinton to the US Senate. There are also landscapes taken in Monument valley in the American West and in Wadi Rum in the Jordanian desert.

Annie Leibovitz has been making witty, powerful images documenting American popular culture since the early 1970s, when her work began appearing in Rolling Stone. She became the magazine’s chief photographer in 1973, and 10 years later began working for Vanity Fair, and then Vogue, creating a legendary body of work.

In addition to her magazine work, Leibovitz has created influential advertising campaigns for American Express, Gap, Givenchy, the Milk Board and the TV series The Sopranos.

The exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum on 20 October 2006 and has since toured in the United States to the San Diego Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. In Europe it was seen at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London. C/O Berlin, Alcala 31 in Madrid and the Kunsthaus Wien in Nienna. The European tour concluded in Stockholm before arriving in Sydney.

Susan Bloom is the international coordinator of the exhibition.

*Based on media release issued by Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Annie Leibovitz, Café Flore, Paris, 1997 Photograph by Martin Schoeller.