TOM McNAUGHT: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome and thank you for your patience. I can assure you that it's well worth waiting for. We are all just absolutely delighted to have Annie with us tonight.
I'm Tom McNaught. I'm the Executive Director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
And on behalf of my colleague, Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and all our colleagues here at the Library and Foundation, it's a great pleasure to welcome you here tonight at the Kennedy Library Forum.
I should begin by acknowledging the generous support of our underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums that make these possible – our lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR.
Tonight we honor one of our country's most well-known and accomplished artists, Annie Leibovitz. [applause] Seriously, it's nervous just being in her presence. [laughter]
Widely considered one of America's best portrait photographers, Annie has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. She is a recipient of numerous honors and was decorated a Commander of the Order of the Arts and the Letters by the French government.
In his remarks at the dedication of the Robert Frost Memorial Library at Amherst College in 1963, President Kennedy spoke of the contributions of this country's artists. And I think his remarks bear repeating tonight in honor of our very distinguished guest. And I quote:
"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow her vision wherever it takes her. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. In serving her vision of the truth, the artist best serves her nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of having nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."
Annie Leibovitz will go down in history as one of the greatest photographers of our lifetime, ranking up there with the likes of Steichen and Karsh and Eisenstadt and Ansel Adams. She is an American artist whose work is already given generations of Americans much to look backward to with pride, and much to look forward to with hope.
So how did she get here? In 1970, a 21-year-old Annie Leibovitz applied for a job with the startup rock music magazine Rolling Stone. Impressed with her portfolio, editor Jann Wenner offered her a job as a staff photographer. Within two years, she was promoted to chief photographer, and by the time she left the magazine ten years later, she had shot 142 covers. And I can judge by the appearance and the age of most of you here, you know every one of those covers [laughter] and you know every one of those rock musicians.
While with Rolling Stone, Annie developed her trademark technique, which involved the use of bold primary colors in surprising poses. And perhaps the most memorable is that one that featured a nude John Lennon curled around his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono. That was taken on December 8, 1980, and Annie was the last photographer, it was the last photo of the former Beatle that was taken hours before John's death.
In 1983, Annie left Rolling Stone and began working for the entertainment magazine, Vanity Fair. With a wider array of subjects, her photographs for Vanity Fair ranged from presidents to literary icons to teen heartthrobs.
In 1991, her collection of over 200 color and black-and-white photographs were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. She was only the second living portrait artist and the only woman to have ever been featured in exhibition by the prestigious gallery.
Annie has published several books, including her most recent work, Pilgrimage, which is now on sale in our Museum store. [laughter]
So many of you are frequent visitors of the Forums and you know how our format goes. Well, tonight's going to be a little bit different. Instead of a moderator, Annie's going to do it solo. She will be presenting slides and commenting on her newest project, Pilgrimage, which is a different kind of book for her. Instead of celebrities and models and VIPs, this is a book of photographs of the homes and objects of people who have inspired her, from Emily Dickenson to Elvis Presley.
So before I close, and believe me, even putting these remarks together was like intimidating. But in closing, I want to quote something that President Kennedy said in the same speech that he did at Amherst. And he said, "I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past."
So thank you, Annie Leibovitz, for helping to fulfill the vision JFK had of this country. [applause]
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Thank you very much. I'm so together that I couldn't find my brush. I ended up brushing my hair with my toothbrush on the way over here. [laughter] We've been running ragged.
It was funny, I just did a book signing at Chapin School in New York and Caroline Kennedy was there signing her books. I've photographed her and Senator Kennedy on several occasions. We traded books and she gave me her book of poems that she had collected. Just this morning, I just looked at the inscription inside; I didn't really see what she had written. She knows that I have three girls going to school at Brearley and we talked a little bit about our children. So she said, "Here's a book of poems to help you keep up with your children at Brearley." I think she was implying they're going to get a lot smarter than I ever got. [laughter] She's great.
This book, this project was really a different road, I went down a different road. I was having a very well-publicized financial moment. I had this idea, and when I read through sections of the book, it will explain to you how the book came about, or how the project came about. My publisher at the time, Random House, was not so interested in doing this book, actually. And the financial people I was dealing with thought that I wasn't spending my time well – Why wasn't I out there making money?
But every now and then we need to go off and do something that fills you up, replenishes you, takes care of you. There are people and places, there's a crazy list that I made. As it turned out, out of the 12 or 13 original places and people that I wanted to visit, I ended up adding practically– all together there's about 27 places. And it was sort of a domino effect; you kept bumping into more and more things.
I went to Concord, Massachusetts, to find Walden Pond. It's just a quick drive from Boston. I drove up and, of course, stumbled over Emerson. Actually, the curator at the Houghton Library – I don't know if she's here tonight – she said to me, "You have to go to Emerson's house." And I kept thinking, okay, okay, I'll add that on.
And then, as I was driving back and forth along the road passing Orchard House seven or eight times, I finally said, okay, okay, I'm going into Orchard House. And that turned into this marvelous, wonderful little moment.
Let me show you the book, let me show you a little bit of the book. I didn't know I had an option to have a Q&A, or a moderator anyway. But I am happy to show you– can I change now, actually? [laughter] It'll be good.
Some of them I'll skip over rather fast, and then I'll come to a block that I want to share with you. At the beginning of the book, this is Ghost Ranch. This is the road near Georgia O'Keeffe's house.
"There was almost no light by the time I arrived at Emily Dickinson's house. I had brought a small digital camera, and I started taking pictures in an abandoned way. I wasn't thinking about it. One of Dickinson's white dresses was displayed in a Plexiglas and I found myself drawn to the detail of the dress, the alabaster buttons, the trim. If you took a picture of the whole dress from far away, it was just a simple white dress. But if you came closer, there was a beautiful ornateness to it.
"Emily and her sister lived alone in the house during the last years of their lives. And after they died it was sold. It's a museum now, but for decades other people lived in it. There was a second house in the museum compound, and the people who were showing us around asked us if we wanted to walk over to it. The light was nearly gone by then and we started to say no, but we ended up taking a little path to the house next door. The houses are very close to each other, only about 300 feet apart, and the second house belonged to Emily Dickinson's brother Austin.
"Emily could see the path that led to Austin's house from her bedroom window. Austin's house was a revelation. I was stopped dead in my tracks. It was dark, mysterious. The wallpaper was falling off the walls. There were heavy curtains. Every bit of wall space had some kind of picture on it, oddly placed. The house had been left the way it was when Emily and Austin were alive. You could feel the people who lived there, and Austin's young son had died in one of those small bedrooms, and I found that I couldn't walk into it.
"I discovered that with the digital camera I didn't need much light. It seemed like I could see into corners. There was none of the color and contrast distortion that you get with film when you push it. The camera was rendering things almost the way I was seeing them.
"I didn't pay much attention to the pictures I took then. I left them in contact sheets in my studio, mixed up with pictures from the bar mitzvah of my cousin's son. The bar mitzvah was the reason I was in Amherst that spring day, and much of my family had come up for the occasion. And my younger sister, Paula, who's a history buff, had suggested that we visit the Dickinson house when we were there.
"Several years ago, Susan Sontag and I were planning something that we called the Beauty Book. The Beauty Book was going to provide an excuse for us to travel around to places we cared about and wanted to see. And for me, it meant going back to taking pictures when I was moved to take a picture, when there was not any agenda.
"I care about my assignment work, but I wanted to try working without that pressure, to be in a situation where I took a picture just because I saw it. And after Susan died, I knew I couldn't do the Beauty Book, although as time passed, I realized I might do a different book with a different list of places. The list would inevitably be colored by my memory of Susan and what she was interested in, but it would be my list. And this wasn't an idea that seemed obvious at first; it came gradually. Emily Dickinson was Susan's favorite poet.
"Two summers ago, I had some business problems that were extremely distracting. I was trying to spend a few weeks with my children at our place on the Hudson in upstate New York, but I kept having to go back to the City for meetings, and I would spend days sitting in rooms with lawyers. Well, this was not something that young children could understand; they were mad at me. We had planned a number of day trips that summer. The first trip I wanted to make, and the longest one, was to Niagara Falls. I thought that the kids would love Niagara Falls. Originally, we were going to take a train, and then I started to think about how my parents would have done something like this when I was growing up. I decided that the best thing to do was to go by car.
"It was a six-hour drive. The children would eat dinner at home, put on their pajamas. We'd there about midnight, I'd put them to bed in the hotel and they would wake up whenever they felt like. We'd open the curtains of the hotel room and they would see the Falls. The view would be a surprise.
"Well, everything went pretty well at first. Our friends Nick and Alex and their daughter Louie came along, and we pulled into the town on the Canadian side on schedule. But when I went up to the desk of the hotel, the clerk said that they had canceled our reservation: 'At 11:00 we ran your credit card and it was rejected. We gave your rooms away.' I said, 'You did what?'
"Well, just then Sarah, my oldest daughter who was not quite eight, got out of the car with her Winnie the Pooh bear and began crying, 'Mommy, Mommy.' And the four-year-old twins woke up and started crying. And everyone was crying. The clerk said they had a motel on the other side of town where there were rooms.
"I got back into the car, headed in that direction, but I stopped at every place we passed, trying to find a room that overlooked the Falls. There was nothing. It was an August weekend, and everything was totally booked up. I had to resign myself to going to the motel suggested by the man who had given away our rooms. We took the last two rooms they had and the kids fell asleep right away. I was unbelievably depressed.
"When it became light the next morning, I got up, went over to the window and pulled open the curtains. I felt like such a failure. The view didn't seem to matter much to the kids. After they woke up, we got dressed and went down to the breakfast room where I had a long phone call with some lawyers. And then we went out on the boat and everyone got wet. And while the kids had lunch, I had a conference call with more lawyers. I just wanted to go home.
"But Sarah asked if she could go to a place that Alex and Louie had been looking at. I said sure, and watched them as they skipped to a spot that overlooked the Falls. After a while, I saw that they were mesmerized. I didn't quite get it, so I went to see what they were watching. It was extraordinary. You really felt like you were floating over the Falls. I stood behind the children and took a picture."
That was really the beginning of the project. I went back to work in September, after August, and started to look at these pictures, and that's when I actually started to make those lists.
"There were a few places in England that I was drawn to. I'd used Sigmund Freud's house once for a location. The curators there had been very accommodating. They invited me to take pictures for myself. I'd used Vanessa Bell's house at Charleston as a background for a Vanessa Redgrave picture, for a Nicole Kidman sitting. But I'd never gone to Monk's House, Virginia Woolf's country house, which is only a few miles from Charleston.
"Virginia Woolf worked in a shed behind the house. I peered through the window. It was windy and the branches of the trees outside the house were moving. Light was filtering through the leaves and then through the window. The room was filled with light and the shadows and leaves were dancing on Woolf's desk. It was the first time in my life that I wished I was making a moving picture.
"According to Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, she was messy; not only when she was working, but in general. This is not something you would know from visiting Monk's House now. In her memoirs, Leonard describes Virginia's room as not merely untidy, but squalid. He remembers her table being littered with used matches, paperclips, broken cigarette holders, manuscripts and bottles of ink. She wrote every day."
This is the River Ouse. And I think probably most of you know this. She just got up one morning and she took a walk for lunch and didn't return; she had drowned in the river.
This is Vanessa Bell's and Duncan Grant's house. They really were sort of the epitome of the whole Bloomsbury medium. Charleston is so extraordinary I almost didn't want to go photograph it, because it's very, very seductive. It's just so beautiful. It was like the height of the Bloomsbury moment.
It's the way we all really want to live, right? [laughter]
And Vita Sackville-West's writing room in Sissinghurst Castle.
Sigmund Freud's coach. Sigmund Freud's room, this is almost like a shrine. When he fled Vienna, he took– he almost had everything intact from the apartment – he had great help leaving Vienna – and reset up his office literally the way it was in Vienna. And I think Leonard Woolf said that it looked like a small museum. And it is a museum now.
While I was in England, I went over to Darwin's house in Kent, Down House. This is his sandwalk. Two or three times a day, he took this walk to just help him think. Oh, I'm sorry, that's the sandwalk.
That last picture actually was a pigeon– no, that's not a pigeon, that's actually from the– let me see if I can go back. There we go. That's actually from the voyage of the Beagle. This actually was a pigeon skeleton, and when I went to the place in Treig, England, which houses the Charles Darwin Collection. The curator was very excited that I was interested in the pigeon, as opposed to– she said, 'Oh, you didn't come for the finches. I'm so happy.'
Because apparently, when he got back from the Beagle, he didn't quite know what he had done. It was probably by accident that he realized he had this great variation on the finch, but he decided to use the pigeon as the main bird that he wanted to study. So at a certain point, I think he was boiling the pigeon bodies in his wife's sink, and eventually she asked him to stop doing that. [laughter] His wife objected he boiled pigeon skeletons for study in the kitchen. Yeah, it was gross.
Val-Kill is not very far from my house in upstate New York. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's home in the Hudson Valley. And this was her bedspread. I went back a couple of times. This is an imprint of her name in her desk, but she and her friends had an industry of building colonial furniture together.
A string holder.
And this one I was really captivated with. Right off her bedroom was a sleeping porch. And I've always thought sleeping porches were extraordinary. She had one and she would stay in it long after, when it became very, very cold, and her family had to drag her back in. She loved sleeping out there.
I'm going to read a small section on Marian Anderson:
"There's a house museum in Danbury, Connecticut, in the middle of town, where Marian Anderson's studio has been preserved. Anderson lived on a farm outside of Danbury for more than 50 years. She and her husband, Orpheus Fisher, bought the property in 1940. They had been looking for a house not far from New York for some time, but it was difficult to find anyone who would sell to a black couple. It didn't matter that Anderson was by then a famous and widely revered singer. Racial prejudice was a fact of life, even in otherwise liberal Northern states like Connecticut.
"Anderson and Fisher were able to buy the farm because he was so light skinned that he would easily pass for white. He negotiated the deal before the sellers were aware of who he and his wife were, and when they found out, they tried to stop the sale, but it was too late.
"The farm was a refuge from Anderson's grueling performing schedule. She traveled from city to city, all over the world, in what were essentially one-night stands. Fisher usually stayed at home. He renovated buildings, designed and built furniture, raised sheep, cows, chickens, and took care of their numerous pets.
"At first, they had 100 acres and a rambling Victorian house and a barn, but after a few years, they sold half of their original property, and Fisher designed a three-bedroom ranch-style house on the plot of land that included Anderson's practice studio and the swimming pool.
"Fisher died in 1986; Anderson died seven years later at the age of 96. And the farm was turned over to a developer who had bought it some years earlier, but had let them live out their lives there. Her studio was moved to Danbury, where it now sits on a parking lot in back of a house museum.
"While I'm glad that the building was saved, but it's kind of sad to look out the window and remember what Anderson could see. „My studio is removed from the house. A brook runs by it,' she told a newspaper reporter. 'It's very quiet. An occasional wind in the trees is the only sound.'
"The director of the museum brought out a box of clothes; most of Anderson's things were auctioned off. But this box had been saved by a woman who was close to her, and the box had been in the woman's attic for years. We looked through it and pulled out a gold dress with a red velour panel that cut through the long swirling skirt like a scar. There were sweat marks where the sleeves met the bodice. This was one of the dresses that Anderson performed in, and you could tell that it was well used. I photographed spread out on the studio floor.
"There were several kimonos in the box of clothes in Danbury, and later when I was going through the photographs in the University of Pennsylvania's Marian Anderson Collection, I saw that Anderson collected kimonos. There were also photographs of her in the gold dress. It must have been one of Anderson's principal concert dresses in 1945 or 1946. Philippe Halsman made a portrait of her in the dress around that time. She's standing in front of a piano, and Anderson was at the height of her fame then. She was on the cover of Time magazine.
"Anderson spent a great deal of time alone in her hotel room when she was on the road in the United States. And when she toured in the South, which she did often, particularly early in her career, she couldn't eat in hotel dining rooms unless special arrangements were made. In the beginning, she couldn't even stay in hotels in the South. It was not easy to work around segregation laws and customs.
"Anderson was never an activist, but by the late '30s, when she had become popular and critically acclaimed, she was in a position to be very important in the civil rights movement. Her performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939, was of enormous political significance.
"The Lincoln Memorial appearance was the result of an attempt by Howard University to rent Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, for a recital by Anderson. The Daughters of the American Revolution owned Constitution Hall, which in 1939 was the best theatre for large concerts in the city. And the Hall's rental contracts had a white-artists-only clause. Blacks were allowed into concerts by white performers, but they had to sit in special sections at the rear of the balcony.
The DAR refused to waive the race ban for Marian Anderson.
"Eleanor Roosevelt, three years earlier, had invited Marian Anderson to sing at the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt's response to the Constitution Hall debate was decisive. She announced in her syndicated column that she was resigning her membership to the DAR because she disapproved of the politics and saw no point in trying to work with it.
"On Easter Sunday, the day that Anderson would have sung at Constitution Hall, she appeared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd that stretched out over the Mall.
"Marian Anderson would forever afterward be a beloved symbol of African American dignity, and Lincoln was transformed, too. The Lincoln Memorial had been created to honor him as the man who preserved the Union. Now he was inextricably associated with the idea of emancipation."
I couldn't help myself. On my list I had the Lincoln Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial led me to Marian Anderson, and it also led me to Lincoln. I cleared the room last Thanksgiving talking about Gettysburg for three hours. [laughter] So I won't get into it. But if any of you are interested in the Civil War, it's so hard not to get obsessed with each of these subjects. Obviously, volumes and volumes and volumes have been written.
I actually became so obsessed with Lincoln I wanted to try to find the original log cabin. Of course, that doesn't really exist. I just thought I would try to find something. It's a great drive. I'm sure a lot of you in the room might have done this. You start in Kentucky where he was born, and you drive up through Indiana, and you go to Springfield, Illinois, where the Lincoln Presidential Library is. At the Lincoln Presidential Library, I found those gloves, which were in his pocket the night he died.
I had a very difficult time because the Lincoln Library in Springfield had this Lincoln hat, and it was so beautiful with the finger marks where he wore the hat through by tipping his hat. And the curator of the Springfield Library felt that Lincoln, probably from chopping so much wood, could do something in the same place all the time. [laughter] That was his theory anyway.
There are no images of anyone in the book, but there is this set of glass plate negatives from the National Archives, actually.
There's actually a beautiful description about Lincoln from his secretary, John Nicolay. He wrote that "Lincoln's features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait. They never got the mobility of his features, the animation of someone who smiled and laughed. The picture was to the man as the grain of sand to the mountain," Nicolay said. "There are many pictures of Lincoln, there is no portrait of him."
Daniel Chester French has a studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And of course, he was also part of that Concord group. Louisa May Alcott's sister, May, taught him art. And he of course was the sculptor for the Lincoln Memorial. He used his own hands as models for the monument in Washington.
Probably the center of the book and one of the big surprises for me was going out to New Mexico and Georgia O'Keeffe. Probably because I think on some level, if you're a woman artist, you're told about O'Keeffe so much in some way, it's sort of hard to comprehend her, she's so big. It's not that I exactly took her for granted, but I didn't quite take her in at all. And I was receiving an award out in Santa Fe at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and I'd been to Santa Fe many, many times, but I'd never went to the Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu.
So they invited me to take a look at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, and I drove out to Abiquiu and walked into O'Keeffe's studio and just broke into tears. It was so austere and beautiful and simple. You'll see, as we go through the book, that I went back several times. She's really definitely the real thing. A great artist.
That was a view, by the way, Ghost Ranch, from her patio. Taken from the Ghost Ranch patio.
The Black Place.
O'Keeffe had this rattlesnake embedded in one of her coffee tables at Abiquiu. She liked to scare anyone coming over. [laughter]
She painted this door.
She bought Abiquiu because it had water rights, so she could have a garden. And she grew her own vegetables, and at the age of 50, she said she started eating right. Adelle Davis was a good friend of hers.
O'Keeffe collected rocks, she loved rocks. If you were a visitor to her house, people started to bring rocks to her. The rocks she liked, she would like keep, and then she would create a discard pile. And then when people came to visit her, she would give them the rock she didn't like, to get them out of the house. And of course, the visitors were so grateful to be given, "Oh, my god, Georgia O'Keeffe gave me this rock." [laughter] But it was the discard pile.
This arrangement was literally the way it was when she died, that box is.
This is a little funny. It's funny to me because after looking at a lot of pictures of O'Keeffe at the Black Place, you see her sort of hunched over, kind of like this at the Black Place. And when I was taken to the Black Place, I had to sort of be blindfolded and walked around in circles. It was like an initiation to be taken to the Black Place.
But when I got there, I was trying to look at the hills and the mountains, and I just looked down, and I said that's why she was always bent over looking over like this, because she was looking for rocks, like at the seashore. And I just aimed the camera down.
This is wonderful. This is right behind her house at Ghost Ranch. Barbara Buhler, the curator at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, did a book where she located all the places that O'Keeffe painted and drew. It was kind of amazing because this hill was really only about 12-feet high, and in O'Keeffe's painting it does look like a mountain.
This is actually storage at the Museum Research Center in Santa Fe. More storage of her bones.
And it's actually beautifully set up at the Research Center. You can pull open drawers. There is a whole new sense in curating today where you can go and look at material that you're interested in studying. They're more accessible than ever. There really is an idea about people being allowed to really look at these things that have been saved.
This is extraordinary to me. Georgia O'Keeffe made these pastels and they really are the colors that she worked with.
She was very frugal. [laughter] I know, I have a lot to learn. [laughter] I just worked really hard and I just thought everything would fall into place. But it was beautiful. The sheets were all frayed.
Martha Graham. I had this idea, having started this project with Emily Dickinson. I've always loved Barbara Morgan's pictures of Martha Graham. I loved dance, I love dance, I love photographing dance. And I thought maybe I could find Martha Graham's costume from "Letters to the World," where she does the kick, and I worked with the Martha Graham Dance Company trying to locate it. They just don't keep those kinds of things. They wear them out and they kind of threw them out. No one was thinking dance is something that belongs– it's ethereal, it comes and it goes.
They offered to take me up to the Yonkers storeroom where we could look through some boxes. And when I got there and walked in, I was just so moved about how it looked, a person's life in these boxes. And there's some Noguchi props to the right. In the far back, the gates to Martha Graham's old townhouse studio building, just stored, leaning against the back wall.
This is actually a photograph that I took for American Music. I threw Graceland in this mix because– well, I think I actually really wanted to get upstairs at Graceland, is really the truth. [laughter] No, I didn't know why I chose Graceland. I just thought it was this Mecca, and I wanted to sort of understand it. And I actually did several trips. And I actually called Lisa Marie Presley. I gave her a phone call and I was really proud of myself that I was called Lisa Marie.
Again, thinking I'm going to get upstairs, I know I'm going to get upstairs in the house.
And I said, "Do you have any suggestions about where I should go photograph when I get down to Graceland," hoping she would say, "Oh, you should definitely just go upstairs." [laughter] But she never said that. She actually said to me I should go to Tupelo, where her father was born.
And I did that.
This was a small, two-room, literally a shack. This was in the bedroom at Tupelo. The Presleys never threw anything away. His mother's dresses were in the closet.
That's the stairway upstairs, which I never got upstairs. [laughter] At a certain point, I didn't want to go upstairs. No, no, that's not true. I mean, if they said to me "you can go upstairs." The closest I got to upstairs was, I did that. They let me light upstairs, which was thrilling, actually.
By the third trip back to Graceland, I was feeling better, I knew it. It's true that Elvis never threw anything away and they had warehouses just filled with all kinds of things, furniture, everything, cars. This was a TV from Elvis's house in Palm Springs. And Elvis collected guns. I actually showed this picture to– I don't know if any of you saw the Letterman Show, but it turns out it's true, that apparently any time Robert Goulet was on the TV [laughter], he shot it out.
Motorcycle.
Monticello. I was there in November, and they have this extraordinary ecoclimate. They're on the side of a hill. As you know, Jefferson collected seeds from all over the world and was fascinated with agriculture, and thought it was the answer.
So the garden was very robust and still flourishing in November. And we literally pulled out the yams, pulled them right out of the ground. The beans. I took a beautiful broccoli home and we cooked it, and all the kids ate it. It was beautiful.
Lewis and Clark's compass.
And this was looking for Annie Oakley, on that drive that I did looking for Lincoln's log cabin, which by the way doesn't exist. There are a lot of replicas. The reason I was fascinated by it was that I had read that P.T. Barnum had toured the log cabin, had made it actually part of a tour. So I kept thinking it had to be somewhere. They believe that that log cabin actually sunk at sea, as they were taking it to Europe. But it turned out it was actually Lincoln's father's log cabin, not Lincoln's.
I know you really wanted to know that. [laughter] See what happens?
Annie Oakley lived out of a trunk. Her boots. A target. Annie Oakley, towards the end of her life, she was obsessed with teaching women how to shoot. She really thought that every woman should be able to shoot a gun. And in her lifetime, she said she taught over 19,000 women how to shoot a gun.
And I don't know what that is, and I'm not going to guess. But Sitting Bull gave it to her.
Again, living on the Hudson, I'm just enamored with Pete Seeger. He's the only living person in this book, I think just to have an excuse to go see him. But I had read, and heard, that he built his own log cabin in the late '40s when he was blackballed and had no money. He just went up, had a small piece of land on the Hudson, and cut his own trees and built his own log cabin. So I went up to see him there, and we had this really wonderful visit.
In his barn, he had this workshop. [laughter] And I just love this room. His grandson was there, and he turned to me and said, "Do you know what's so great about my grandfather's house is you can put something down and you can come back in ten years and it's still there." [laughter]
Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House. Beth Alcott made the rag doll in the blue dress in the 1850s, and her sister May painted its face. And Louisa May gave the doll on the right to May's daughter, Lulu, whom she took care of after May's death.
This is very beautiful, Bronson Alcott's journal. His daughter Louisa May comes into his study and he traced her hand inside it. This is at the Houghton Library also. You have a lot of great things here, a lot of really great things here.
I should have talked a little bit about Emily Dickinson's herbarium, because it was beautiful. It was a privilege to have it taken out of its vault here at Harvard. We placed it next to a window and just shot it in natural light. No one was breathing in the room.
This is a carte de visite book that Louisa May Alcott created with her own hands. This is actually Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the regiment of black soldiers in the Civil War.
Modjeska. George Eliot and George Sand. Edmund Booth and his daughter. And of course, Louisa May Alcott's writing desk, which her father built for her.
Those of you have gone to Walden Pond, I'm sure a lot of you in this room have, I was just surprised to find a big mound of rocks there. I actually took a rock – this is really terrible – I took a rock from the Spiral Jetty, which is at the end of the book, and added it to this tradition, to this pile that actually Bronson Alcott had started at the site of Thoreau's cabin.
Well, this is one of those places also I never felt I quite got it and I kept coming back and coming back and coming back. Still didn't quite get it.
Another one of these. I don't think you're quite seeing what this is. This is actually Thoreau's bed, which is at the Concord Museum. And I was just so impressed with it. Not knowing much about Thoreau and the movement, I thought maybe Thoreau slept on the ground or on nails, or something. [laughter] Who would think he was so sophisticated and he walked to town every day. And this is a piece taken from a Chinese sofa bed. He actually died on this bed. I wish they didn't quite tell me that as I was photographing it.
Emerson's drawer. Out of focus Emerson hat. The view from Emerson's window. His books. Still in Emerson's house.
John Muir. Emerson brought me out to John Muir in California. John Muir's notebooks.
Julia Margaret Cameron's lens. I went to the Isle of Wight searching for Julia Margaret Cameron.
This is Tennyson's door.
This is a wall that I actually have a couple of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs and this wall appears as a background in some of the pictures.
Tennyson's Down. That's Fresh Water Bay and the chalk cliffs.
How are you doing? Hanging in there? [laughter] I didn't hear any coughs the last ten minutes.
"I wanted to make an homage to Ansel Adams. Ansel Adams visited the Yosemite Valley for the first time in 1916. He was 14 years old. He'd been given his first camera. And from that moment on, Adams was devoted to Yosemite. The Valley had restorative powers for him. He made thousands of photographs of Yosemite and was a committed lobbyist on its behalf, and Ansel Adams's pictures are what most people think of when they think of Yosemite.
"One summer in the 1980s when I was teaching at the annual Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop, I walked out to Inspiration Point to take a picture. The clouds had rolled in and the Valley looked magnificent. It seemed amazing to me that you could just walk up and take an Ansel Adams picture. Well, of course you couldn't really. Ansel himself said that people were disappointed when they went to these places and their pictures didn't look like his.
"The summer in the '80s when I was at the workshop, I mean Jean Adams, who was married to Ansel's son Michael. And Jean is a very outgoing, joyful and smart woman. She ran the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite for a while, and Jean still has a cabin there, so I called her up and talked to her about the picture I wanted to take. She said to come out and we would look around.
"I had in mind the view of the Valley in one of Ansel's most well-known pictures, Clearing Winter Storm. He made it in 1935, and I thought it was taken from the spot I'd walked out to in the '80s. But I wasn't exactly sure. And when my assistant Nick Rogers and I drove into the Park, we stopped at a place called Tunnel View which looks like the right spot. There are two parking lots at Tunnel View, which means that fewer people fall off the side of the road than they did before. And there's always at least one photographer there, and usually about ten. It's a mecca. "That first afternoon, someone with an 8-by-10 camera and a darkroom in the back of his car was making tintypes. It was kind of wonderful. I took a couple of pictures, but there wasn't a cloud in the sky. What's extraordinary about Clearing Winter Storm is the clouds.
"Well, Jean Adams's cabin is an A-frame Yosemite West, not far from the village where the gallery is. We lit a fire and made dinner. I looked at the maps I had, and Jean had a couple of maps, and we were trying to figure out where Clearing Winter Storm was made. Well, there was Inspiration Point, Old Inspiration Point. Then there was Artist Point. It was confusing.
"Tunnel View is on a road that was completed in 1933, so it would have been available to Ansel, although if you study his picture it seems like he was standing a little more to the right and higher up; something is off. You can see further down the Valley in Ansel's picture.
"There was still no clouds the next morning. I mentioned this at breakfast and Jean looked at me and said, "Annie, Ansel would wait two or three weeks for clouds." [laughter] And then she said, "You know, those old-time landscape photographers, if you look closely at their pictures, you can see that they took clouds from one place and used them over and over again." [laughter] Well, I cringed. That's something I do all the time in my digital portrait work; if I don't have the right sky, I'll add some clouds.
"Well, I was glad to hear about the early landscape photographers borrowing clouds. But I felt very strongly that for this picture it had to be straight. I wasn't going to mess around; it had to be the real thing. So we went to Tunnel View and I shot the sunrise. And there's still no clouds.
"The light wasn't very good so I thought we should look for the other views, not that I had to be exactly where Ansel was, but it would be nice to know. So at the parking lot across the road, there was a sign that said 'Inspiration Point, 1.2 miles.' So we took some bottles of water and headed off to steep, uphill. We weren't moving very fast. We stopped to look at the view several times, and after a while we got to a place where an old road crossed the trail. Trees had fallen across and you could still see a little asphalt. The sign pointed further up the trail to Inspiration Point. And that part of the trail was fairly steep, and Jean was wearing what looked like slippers."
Actually, I couldn't put this in the book, but at that point she decided to tell me she had just had heart surgery. [laughter] And I was looking at her, she really was literally wearing slippers. I love Jean Adams to death, but it was like– I just said, okay. And I was just trying to figure out what's the best way to get out of here.
"She said she had always wanted to walk the old road, which she thought went to Bridalveil Falls, and since I could see that it went down, that seemed like a good idea. So we headed off in that direction.
"So when we got back to Jean's house, someone checked the weather report which said that nothing was going to change. There were to be no clouds that day. Well, I don't usually pay any attention to weather reports, but it didn't look good and we decided to leave early and driver over to Carmel, where Jean and Michael live in Ansel's old house. It's where his darkroom is. Ansel built the house in the early '60s on a site just a mile from Edward Weston's house.
"I photographed the darkroom and then went back to New York. A few days later I got an email from Jean saying that she and Michael had gone to the park on the weekend and that the clouds were glorious. [laughter] Well, for the next two or three months I kept trying to find a day that I could pop back into Yosemite, not that you can ever 'pop' into Yosemite, especially in the middle of winter. If you even try to get in without chains, they give you a fine. But I finally did get back in January, and of course there were no clouds. [laughter]
"So I ended up making some pictures through the windshield of the car, and took some views of roads. I started to think maybe there's another picture I should be taking. We went up to Tunnel View. No clouds. But okay, took pictures anyway.
"About ten days before I had to turn this book over to the printer, I flew out to Yosemite again. I knew that it was a crazy thing to do, but things looked promising when we arrived at the Fresno Airport. We threw our equipment into a van and raced toward the Valley. There was a hailstorm and a lot of rain, and for a while the road was socked in by a cloud. It was already late afternoon and I was afraid that we would miss the light.
"I wouldn't let anyone in the car talk about the weather. It took three hours to get to Tunnel View, but when we arrived the Valley was still filled with clouds and mist. I jumped out with my camera, found a place among the 30 or so other people who were crowded around taking pictures. They were tourists and several photography students. Mateus ran behind me with a tripod, but there was no time to set up. I got about eight frames before the light changed and the clouds disappeared. They didn't come back."
This was a journey to Farnsworth House, which I've always been fascinated with. It's been frustrating for me because I think I figured out how I wanted to photograph Farnsworth House. It was built on a floodplain and I was told that actually it does flood once a year, and I was on a hotline with the curator; if it was going to flood, I was going to try to get out and photograph it in water. And Mies van der Rohe did build it on stilts so that it survive the river rising.
The first time I saw the Farnsworth House it was closed. We got there just before the light went, and there was a park across the way and I went over and saw it from across the river. I don't think we quite realized how close it is to the river.
Old Faithful.
"Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was always on my list of places, even the lists I made with Susan. And for a long time the Spiral Jetty was only known through photographs, and not just because it had been obscured by water a few years after it was built. It's in a remote place, a desolate edge of the Great Salt Lake. Smithson assumed that not many people would find their way to see it, and he made a film about it that was shown in galleries and museums. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, just three years after the Spiral Jetty was completed. He was 35.
"The rocks are black and the water is an eerie pink in the original photographs. The hue of the water was the main reason Smithson chose the site. Bacteria and algae that thrive in saltwater create a color that he described as looking like tomato soup. And when the water began receding in about 1999, the rocks in the surrounding lake bed were covered in saline crystals; everything was white.
"In an interview Smithson gave two months before his death, he talked about the interaction of people and places over time. „I don't think things go in cycles‟ he said, „I think things just change from one situation to the next. There's really no return.‟
"My list of places turned out to be arbitrary. Some of them have always meant something to me, and some of them I went to out of curiosity, some of them were along a path I stumbled onto. But all of them made an impression. And from the beginning when I watched my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, this project was an exercise in renewal. Looking at history provided a way of going forward. I always knew that the Spiral Jetty would be the last picture as both as an end and a beginning."
Thank you. [applause]
Did I go too long? Are you guys okay? This is the second time I've done this. Oh, some sleeping in the back. [laughter] It is kind of like doing the Civil War, my summer vacation. So I'll entertain a couple questions if you're up for it. Is it time for dinner? This is an older crowd. This is great. I'm not talking about you, I'm just talking about– okay, okay! [laughter]
Q: I was struck by the colors, especially foliage shots, and they don't look real. I'm wondering how you got to that saturation, that vivid quality.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I didn't really get a chance to see– it looked a little bright on this screen.
I think we're dealing with new color now. You could also say that about Kodachrome.
Q: Are those film? Digital?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I think digital is different. I spend time with the work after it's photographed and then try to bring it to life. Which one do you think doesn't look real? [laughter]
Q: They're fantastic. They all look real. I've never seen anything quite like that. But were those film or digital?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: The whole book is digital. And it was a digital exercise. When I discovered you need less light for digital, I was fascinated by the latitude and what you could do with it. When I walked into Dickinson's house and was shooting, it was 5:00 in the afternoon and there was practically no light left inside the house, which is dark anyway. And I just thought, oh, my goodness, it was photographing so beautifully, and that's what made me think I wanted to find places to photograph.
And then of course, the project turned into more about locations and landscape. And something I never believed I could tackle before, which was objects, which became very difficult.
Q: You did well.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I hope it doesn't look so unreal. Those colors, the Smithson Jetty, those are those colors.
Q: It was more of some of the foliage scenes.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: The foliage. I think green is not a color that recorded very well in color film. I remember being scared when I saw a background that was green, too green. To me, it was like a black in film. I think we're seeing greens now. Okay, I threw a little yellow into the greens.
I think it's a whole different kind of color, and especially projected or with light behind it. I love books and I'm glad it's printed in a book, and I always saw it as a book, but when you see the digital on the screen you realize that's probably where it should be. It does look great like that.
Q: So first, you didn't clear the room. And it's Thanksgiving, almost. So congratulations. My question, on the Spiral Jetty, someone else had art there up in the upper right-hand side.
Somebody had written "something sucks"?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Yeah.
Q: Anybody else would have probably Photoshopped that out, but it's reality. So what did it say? You couldn't see it. And is there a story behind it?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: It was crusty salt and you could actually walk out there. I think there was a lot of, even in Smithson's time, there was a lot of junk, cars and everything that was left out there. And some of that has been cleaned up. And I did think about it, oh, should I take "sucks" out? [laughter] But I decided to leave it.
Q: I just didn't know. It was so big. I thought maybe it might have some other story.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: That's true, you don't usually get to see it this big probably.
Q: So we wouldn't see it in the book.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I think you can see it in the book, yeah. I didn't think I should tamper with it. But I did think about it. I just thought, is this distracting? I think Smithson would have liked it.
Q: Probably. Thank you.
Q: Hi, I had two questions. The first is, if you were going to buy a digital camera for Christmas, what would you buy? [laughter]
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I got myself in a little bit of trouble the other day on Brian Williams's show. I had the iPhone with me and I'm not actually– I think it's extraordinary. What I really meant to say is you can use your cell phone now to take pictures. That's a great– but if you want a camera camera–
Q: Um hmm.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Who do you want to buy it for?
Q: Myself. I've done blacks and white.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: It depends what you want to do.
Q: Creative.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Okay, well, I did most of this project, the beginning anyway, with a very small Canon. I think at the time it was the G11. And it's great. Because in my day job I have to carry around bigger cameras, when I'm not doing that, I love having something small and being able to shoot when you feel like it, just not worrying about carrying something heavy. I think when you have to carry something heavy, it gets in the way.
There's just great small cameras out now. The G11, I believe it's now the G12 is out, is a great little camera.
Q: I have just one more question, different vein. You mentioned this whole process as being redemptive for you, and I was just wondering, if you could take a picture, or one of the pictures you have sort of could take a picture of salvation, what would that look like for you?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: It's been difficult for me to ever center on one photograph; I really love the series. For years I tried to do the “decisive moment.” It's about there's so many moments in life. Like this project, it doesn't end, it keeps going on some level. There's more work to be done on it.
Even in my assignment work when I get asked about what's my favorite picture, I end up saying, they're like brothers and sisters to each other; they sort of need each other. They don't look good by themselves. So it's hard for me to pick one picture. I think that I did pick Niagara Falls because it had so many layers to it for me. I mean, I love when a picture has so many levels. My children showed me that picture.
Q: Which is a layer.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: The thing is, well, should I jump or not? That's the other idea. [laughter] I said, oh, I think I'll have to hang around a little bit longer for my children.
Q: Thank you so much.
Q: Thank you so much for sharing with us. I was curious how your approach to photography and your subjects has changed from back in the beginning when you were relatively unknown to now when I would expect if you went to Graceland and expressed an interest in seeing upstairs, there'd be no question that you'd be asked to go up there.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I never asked them. You really are hearing my thoughts. In the long run I felt completely at peace that I didn't go upstairs. They took me through the house and they were so kind, those people there, and they took down all the stanchions and the ropes, and I walked. And I said something's different this trip, I don't know what it is. And you realize you're in a house, it really was a house. And you have to respect that. And the family uses the upstairs. And they still go back there for Christmases sometimes.
It's a strange situation where you have millions of people a year going through your house. But I really felt it like a house for the first time. It wasn't my business. If someone wanted to offer that to me, I certainly wouldn't say no. He died there, so they are very protective about it. It's where the family still goes and lives.
Anyway, I'm fine. What was your question? [laughter]
Q: I was just going to say, would you say that you've taken sort of a gentler approach to your subjects as far as waiting for them to offer rather than being more aggressive about "oh, it would be great to have this"?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I've definitely calmed down. [laughter] I think when I was younger, I think I've gone through the whole arc of being a jerk, obnoxious, to trying to be a nicer, trying – the karma – a nicer person.
Q: From paparazzi to gentler.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Well, I never was a paparazzi. That world shocks me, what goes on there. It's rude and aggressive. In fact, street photography never really interested me. I always want to know the person. I wanted to know who I was photographing. Felt awkward just photographing people just on the streets. It wasn't something I was ever really that interested in.
Q: Thank you very much.
Q: I'm curious about a photograph that was way back in the beginning when you were doing the Niagara Falls thing, and it was some brightly colored fake birds. I don't know what that was.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: It's in the Amherst Museum, and it is Mabel Todd's friend's set of birds. It's actually a period piece. I was taken with it myself, and then it turned out to not really be related to Dickinson, and I still kept it in the book. So I kind of pushed over it. But I love it, I love it, it's such a strange picture. It was of that time, in the late 1800s, or middle 1800s, when they tried to collect everything, they wanted to collect everything.
Q: Thank you.
Q: Hi, I love your humility and your humor, it's so wonderful.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Thank you.
Q: My question is, I have two questions. One is, when you went from film to digital, did you feel like a traitor? What was your experience? What came up for you?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: Never, never, no, no, no. This is such a silly thing. When Kodachrome went away – this is my little story – when Kodachrome went away in the '70s/'80s, I don't even remember anymore, photographers ran to the store, bought it in boxes, hoarded it, put it in their refrigerator. It's such an interesting time technologically, what's going on with digital. And we're all learning together; we don't have it totally figured out. And we're going to be figuring it out together.
I loved the darkroom, it was an amazing rite of passage for me. But there'll be a different kind of idea for the next generation. My cameras don't have names. They're not like George and Henry. I've never been connected to the technical end of what I do. I've always believed in content, what's in the picture. And if you look at a picture and are thinking, What lens was it done with– I'm worried about the color now, I'm going to have to go back and look at it. [laughter] But it's always been about content, and it really should be that. And it doesn't matter how we get there, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what kind of camera. Whatever is the easiest way to forget you have a camera.
Q: And how do you feel about Photoshop?
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: I'm heavy into it. [laughter] I think it's kept my career going for the last ten years, actually. No, I think it's something that needs– we're all on a learning curve and I think that we have to be careful.
It used to be, oh, you can't tell what's real and what's not anymore. It's not true. We're not stupid. We look at something, we know, oh, that's ridiculous, we know that's not real. I've always believed in the intelligence of us as people. So we know when something– it will go in cycles. It will be like everything looks crazy and cuckoo, and then people will be sick of that and want it to be real again. And it will be real again. But that's how we entertain ourselves.
Thank you. [applause]