Minutes after the audience in Hendricks Chapel caught sight of her Thursday night, Annie Leibovitz was taking photographs. With a simple point-and-shoot, she snapped shots of the crowd as it settled down, amid a shout or two of “We love you, Annie!”

A shot of the crowd that seeped out the chapel doors. Click. A shot of the center balcony, also full. Click. A shot of the side balconies, with about 25 people standing in each back row and two people on each step in the aisles. Click, click.

Leibovitz put away the camera to sit through two introductions – one to wrap up the 2009-10 University Lectures series and the other summarizing the numerous high points in her photography career, which includes the iconic Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon wrapped around Yoko Ono and the Vanity Fair cover of a pregnant Demi Moore.

Kelly Rodoski, communications manager for the Office of News Services, said the event was probably the highest attended of this season’s University Lectures.

“The chapel seats 1,100 and we’re over capacity,” she said. “People were standing outside the door.”

Wearing classic Annie Leibovitz black, the celebrated photographer alternated between personal anecdotes and selections from her book “At Work.” On a towering projection screen, photographs from her career complemented the stories she told – a trip with her kids to Niagara Falls, family car rides from her youth, the three weeks she spent photographing a group of dancers in the woods.

“The outdoors became my studio,” she said as landscape photographs transitioned onto the screen.

Leibovitz also displayed a current personal project, titled “Pilgrimage.”

“No people in the pictures. No one’s talking back,” she said, introducing photos taken at the homes of Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud and Georgia O’Keeffe. Also shown was Virginia Woolf’s writing studio, where “the light danced along the desk,” Leibovitz said. A photograph of the river Woolf drowned herself in followed.

Instead of discussing some of the iconic images she is known for, Leibovitz focused on more current work, such as photographing Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace.

She also revealed her favorite picture – but only if she had to pick one because she normally tells people she likes her entire body of work. The photo was taken of her mother.

“There’s a relationship in this picture,” she said. “My mother was looking at me as if the camera wasn’t there.”

Leibovitz said she focused on her family as she showed photos of her niece, Samantha, a senior in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and wished her luck as she nears graduation.

A Q&A session followed in which Leibovitz shared her favorite equipment (there’s a G11 she likes in particular), advice for aspiring photographers (“think of projects you yourself want to initiate”) and where she thinks the industry is going (“the still image is still powerful” – a statement that made much of the audience applaud).

Kari O’Mara, a senior photography major from Cazenovia College, got in a car as soon as she heard about the event an hour before it started. O’Mara said she appreciated hearing some of Leibovitz’s flaws.

“I thought she wouldn’t talk about her financial situation,” O’Mara said. “She only did a little bit, but as an up-and-coming photographer myself, it is good to know there are flaws out there. I think she spoke to us not so much as a superior but as a fellow artist.”

O’Mara said she was glad she made the trip from Cazenovia.

“I was glad that she focused on her more recent body of work, though I feel like she kept flip-flopping between, ‘OK, we’re talking about my child’s trip and now we’re talking about the Queen of England,’” O’Mara said. “But from other artist talks I’ve been to, she was very articulate, she knew what she was talking about, she was very concise, didn’t meander. So overall, I thought she was good.”

 

Published on May 2, 2010 at 12:00 pm