Annie Leibovitz

I have looked at many portraiture photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Eve Arnold and Francesco Scavullo and have decided to use the photographer Annie Leibovitsz as my first influence as I really liked her portraits and I thought they were interesting. I felt that many of her images gave a strong sense of a narrative, expression and portrayed beauty. Annie developed her love for photography in 1967 when she attended San Francisco Art Institute. She is an 65 year old American portrait photographer and she has developed her skills through working for the Rolling Stone magazine when she got the job in the 1970's. Back in the early days before the Rolling Stone the photos she took she describes as "whatever happened, happened" compared to when she was doing the covers for the Rolling Stone she says you have to "sort of set things up" and this is where she started to think about how to take the photographs as her models would ask Leibovitz what exactly she wanted them to do e.g. pose, facial expression. In the 1980's she started to use a new style of lighting and the bold colours and poses the models were doing in her work got her a place with the Vanity Fair magazine. Since the 1990's Annie has been publishing and exhibiting her work. Some cameras that Annie shoots with include Mamiya RZ67 camera, Canon EOS 1Ds mark III camera, Leica S2 camera and many more. She also loves using a darkroom and focuses more on the content of an image she is capturing rather than the tools she is using or how she does it.

How am I going to use Annie Leibovitz as an influence?
I am going to use Annie as my influence simply for looking at portraiture and capturing the beauty in the image however my images are going to be more studio based focusing on just the model with nothing else in the background as if the image was going to be used in a magazine e.g. Vogue.