American portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz has been making powerful images documenting popular culture since the early 1970s, when she began working as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone magazine. With a career spanning over 40 years, she has received numerous awards and has worked with the Queen of England, photographed John Lennon hours before he was assassinated, put a naked, pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair and is the only woman to have held an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery. She has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
WOMEN: New Portraits is an exhibition of newly commissioned photographs, a continuation of a project that began over fifteen years ago when her most enduringly popular series of photographs, Women, was published in 1999, a project that she and partner, the late American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag, launched in the 1990s. WOMEN: New Portraits reflects the changes in the roles of women today and will evolve over the coming year as a body of work.
The new portraits feature women of outstanding achievement including artists, musicians, CEOs, politicians, writers and philanthropists. In addition to the new photographs, the exhibition includes works from the original series, as well as other unpublished photographs taken since.
Commissioned by global financial services firm UBS, the exhibition of new photographs opened to the public in Hong Kong on June 3 and will run until June 26 in the Cheung Hing Industrial Building, Kennedy Town as part of a 10-city global tour.
Speaking at the press event in Hong Kong on May 31, Leibovitz said: “When I asked UBS about updating the WOMEN’s project there was no hesitation. They said let’s do it, and they have been extraordinary in every way. It is such a big undertaking and a broad subject, it is like going out and photographing the ocean.”
Despite the magnitute of the project, the relevance and importance behind it was never in doubt.
“There was a piece in the paper this weekend that said even though there are well-educated, professional women in Hong Kong, only 11 percent of corporate board members are female. In the US it's not that much better at 20 percent. The UK is 26 percent and I think we should all move to Norway because it’s 40 percent. Women’s issues are certainly global issues.”
The choice of a run-down, unassuming industrial building in Kennedy Town as her exhibition venue in Hong Kong was a deliberate vote against gentrification, and seeing an exhibition of some of the most famous and weatlhy people today in a place other than Hong Kong’s swanky and glitzy venues makes for a breath of fresh air. The venue used to be an electronics factory and had sat empty for 20 years until Leibovitz’s team moved in.
“I didn’t want to use a place that already had an identity for showing art. I wanted a place we could claim for ourselves; I wanted to participate in the revitalisation of this space,” the photographer explained. “I like that it’s a bit of Old Hong Kong and in an area that’s up-and-coming; there’s no doubt that this area will be an important art area.”
The exhibition was first staged at London’s Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in January and has always been shown in unusual industrial spaces, including an art space inside a printing factory in a Tokyo suburb and an old railway station in Singapore. Her determination to avoid “museum like” venues is because the Women project remains unfinished and is a pop-up show – part of the art, the installation, is about found places.
Three massive high-resolution flat screens project revolving images of famous faces from the supermodels of the 90s to teenage Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafazi, the Pakistani activist for girls’ rights to education photographed in a classroom in Birmingham, England.
The scope and reach of this project was always going to be challenging, reflecting “the unprecedented changes in the consciousness of many women in the last decades.”
Over the third floor in the 44-year-old industrial building on the northwestern tip of Hong Kong Island, with its uneven cement flooring, the A4- size portraits are strung up on rope and affixed to a pinboard rather than perfectly framed and mounted as they would be in a traditional gallery space.
Leibovitz explained that the rough-and-ready display of the new portraits is intended to be “democratic”, with no subject being bigger than any other, and is styled as a “pop-up” since it is an “installation” of an ongoing project focusing on women she admires.
Looking back from the walls are faces of showgirls in Las Vegas, ballet dancer Misty Copeland looking majestic and strong, Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi photographed in Los Angeles in 2012, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, looking relaxed and comfortable in an office in California, a portrait of Liebovitz with her three daughters, Yao Chen, the Chinese actress who speaks on humanitarian issues to her 78 million Weibo followers, and primologist Jane Goodall, of whom the photographer spent a good deal of time talking about at the Hong Kong event, and of whom Leibovitz is visibily in awe.
People often ask Liebovitz how she gets the most out of her subjects and her response is humble and pragmatic. “I’m really not a great director when it comes to taking photographs. I really need projection from my subject. I’m a good journalist. I sometimes have people ask me, ‘how do you make them feel comfortable?’ and I say ‘I don’t.’ It really has a lot to do with them, and what they can project. I can’t really help them with taking their photograph.”
The diverse nature of her subjects also means that, at times, she gets very small windows of opportunity to spend with her time-strapped sitters. But either way, no matter how much time she has, if the session isn’t flowing, the best thing to do is to give it a break.
“I find that as I get older I don’t like to spend as much time. I don’t think it should be a laboured process. In portrait photography if you don’t have it after a couple of hours then just stop. Get out of there and come back because it’s sort of like beating a dead horse.”
Leibovitz is showing dozens of portraits of women she and her friend, American feminist activist Gloria Steinem have selected for their “outstanding achievements”.
An essay from Steinem, included in the exhibition, sums the intention up: “Annie Leibovitz captures women in all our human variety and idiosyncrasy, simplicity and artifice, bravery and fear, creativity of mind as well as womb: in other words in all our humanity. No notion as limited as gender can account for all the truths in this exhibit.”
After Hong Kong, the exhibition will move on to Mexico City, Frankfurt, New York and Zurich.
