Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Annie Leibovitz picked me up from the station and drove us north along a twisting road through mysterious woods, the long autumn light flashing between the trees. She has kept a home here in upstate New York since 1996. The 200-acre plot and complex of stone buildings are part of the old Astor estate, their steep-shingled roofs and soaring chimneys fanciful creations of the Gilded Age.Leibovitz parked, her hands fluttering for a moment over the digital dashboard — “I can never tell if this car’s off or not” — and explained some recent renovations. She has a deep, beguiling voice and a curiously touching way of phrasing her thoughts as questions. We sat for a minute, car doors open, engine ticking, birds beeping in the trees. “I just wanted a piece of land where I didn’t see another house,” she said. Leibovitz, the near-mythic photographer, is tall and milk-skinned. She turned 75 last month but is still deliberate in her stride and more beautiful now than when she was young. She led the way into the kitchen, where soft clouds of chickeny steam — some kind of soup — hit us like a gust. It is a lovely house of low ceilings and nooks, with one room opening on to another. She walked ahead, pointing out features including a secret door. Things found and loved over the years, rocks, feathers, old books, fill the space like a rambling poem, emanating the same sensitivity to beauty that marks Leibovitz’s work. She is always working, she said, though that work takes many forms, including reading. I asked if she was ever able to relax. “You know, I really like to work. It’s something about being older, I think. Hmm, what do I do to relax? I don’t know. I don’t think about that.” That Leibovitz is as starry as the 15,000 people she has photographed is hardly worth stating. But she is also more than that. When you spend time with her, in her world, you begin to appreciate the impartial curiosity with which she meets everything in it. Talking to her is fascinating, occasionally effortful. She can be dismissive, but there is no malice in it. We ate lunch on our laps in front of a fire, the wind percussive in the chimney.The previous day we had met in New York, where she has a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. It was the day before the US presidential election, the city a hectic fever dream of anticipation, and Leibovitz, she confessed later, “like a rubber band or something”. We began by walking around the exhibition. The photographs are “a sort of personal best”, arranged thematically in loose sequences. There are some portraits, none elaborate, also interiors and still lifes. She worked hard on the show, and it didn’t come together easily. At a guess, it must feel exposing. There is so much of herself here on display.After the tour, we sat in two low chairs marooned in an ocean of gallery. Leibovitz was anxious about the lighting and the tones of one of the prints. Part of the reason for the show, she said, was to create new prints. She has one eye on her legacy: “You start to understand that you’re not going to be here for ever — really understand it. It’s an interesting something that enters into your life.” She isn’t frightened, “and I don’t know why. I wish I could be here longer for my children. But I think every parent feels that way, no matter how old they are.” Leibovitz has three daughters: Sarah, 23, and twins Susan and Samuelle, 19. After a while we got up again. Leibovitz seemed happier in motion. We looked at the giant pinboard she’d created for the show. “This is me being nervous and insecure,” she said, but it’s riveting, covered in little prints on cheap paper, things she was thinking about but didn’t quite fit the show, including recent reportage of Kamala Harris. “I love process. I thought, ‘I might as well show process.’ It’s a little discombobulated, because even I get overwhelmed with how much work there is.”That an artist of Leibovitz’s stature could feel nervous about an exhibition somehow strains belief, but she is still acclimatising to the art world and chary of its critics, a number of whom have been disparaging of her having stepped beyond the glossy field in which she earned her renown. Richard Avedon faced similar opprobrium, and Leibovitz has drawn strength from that. She talked about the mauling she received for her 2010 exhibition, A Photographer’s Life, which mixed magazine assignments with personal work, including documenting the dying days of her friend and lover Susan Sontag. “It was important to explain myself, and explain myself once,” Leibovitz said at the time. Even so, the harm the criticism caused her clearly still churns away in her head somewhere. More recently, she has met other criticisms, principally that she doesn’t know how to photograph Black skin tones. She does not want to speak on record about this. After seeing the show, which includes several portraits of Black people, I wonder if it is partially intended as a response. Her triptych of the artist Kara Walker is breathtaking. Who does she turn to for encouragement, show new work to? “I don’t have a real bouncer at this point . . . Anna [Wintour] is a loyal, fierce friend. You really bond from journalism, trying to cut through everything. I’ve told her, when she decides to go, I’ll go.”Leibovitz was born in Connecticut, the third child of Samuel and Marilyn Leibovitz. Her mother liked to make 8mm films and group photographs. “If there’s a first inspiration, it would be that.” Leibovitz began working for Rolling Stone magazine before she graduated from San Francisco Art Institute, and felt from the start she had to record her era. “I didn’t shrug away from it,” she told me. The flamboyant portraits of celebrities and heart-throbs she is most known for began in the early 1980s, when she hit on “placing my subject in the middle of an idea”. Meryl Streep in a mime artist’s whiteface in 1981, for instance, or Leonardo DiCaprio with a swan draped around his neck in 1997. She moved to Vanity Fair in 1983, and Vogue in 1993. She’s poised to sort through the negatives from this period for a follow-up to 2017’s Early Years exhibition at LUMA Arles. “It’s gonna be a bit of a dilemma, between the history and ‘Is it a good photograph?’. Because history does sort of take over.”There is a second house on the grounds of her upstate home and Leibovitz asked if I wanted to walk over to it. The Pond House is her favourite workspace. Sontag liked to write in it too, in the bedroom. After a swim in the pond, “I would scream up at her [Sontag], tell her to come down and jump in,” Leibovitz says. “It seems so long ago.”For a while she was thinking of selling up and buying a place on the Hudson, but her children begged her not to sell. We sit for a moment, inhaling the quiet. “This is what I do when I’m not working,” she says suddenly, eyes closed, face tilted towards the sun. It’s the image of her I carry away. Present, listening intently, yet far, far away. “Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness” is at Hauser & Wirth, New York, until January 11 2024Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first
