About Annie Leibovitz: Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer.
It's hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.
You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.
I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.
I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.
Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.
As much as I'm not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it's quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.
When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.
The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.
At my Rolling Stones' tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way.
If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.
It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.
Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.
Everyone keeps asking you for pictures, and after a while you get tired of that. I always say, They are in the archives.
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.
As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera...
I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.
When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't true. What became important was to have a point of view.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.
