Annie Leibowitz Portraits 2005-2016 By Annie Leibovitz Illustrated. 316 pp. Phaidon. $89.95.

The first sentence of Alexandra Fuller’s opening essay for “Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016” hit me and stuck. She calls it a “book of revelations.” Through 150 color and black-and-white photographs, Leibovitz portrays a varied landscape of influence today, one that spans nations, disciplines and contexts.

Actors, artists, musicians, politicians and athletes appear — faces most would recognize. But among these “Portraits” one also finds Denise Manong, a woman living with H.I.V. in a South African town, embracing her daughter Linamandia, who has been spared the disease. From a harsh, litter-strewn Mexican landscape, the beautiful and fierce human rights lawyer Andréa Medina Rosas looks us straight in the eye as if challenging all to join her crusade on sexual violence against women. Defying all odds in her region, Medina Rosas is still alive.




Colors, textures, stances and expressions play off one another not only within individual photos but also among them in the collection’s masterly sequencing. A hot Havana pink envelops a red-hot Rihanna. Lupita Nyong’o, in profile against a charcoal backdrop, draws you in and will not let go.

Venus and Serena Williams are entwined in one photograph, immediately followed by two solo shots of Serena that further show the exquisite and powerful forces of nature that they are. In one, Serena stands facing away from the camera with her hands splayed against a cloth backdrop, all muscles taut and ready for action, evoking an earlier Leibovitz portrait of another tennis great, Martina Navratilova. In the final image in the series, Serena embodies full womanly beauty, her pregnant figure revealingly wrapped in a flowing, earth-toned caftan.

As Leibovitz notes in her afterword, location, “the history of a place, its sounds and smells, influences a picture in ways that are impossible to achieve in a studio.” She identifies her own artistic “edge” as the sheer “accumulation of images” that “bounce off one another and become elements in a bigger story.”



Ms. Leibovitz in a 2012 self-portrait.CreditAnnie Leibovitz/Trunk Archive

Part of this bigger story — which the book does not tell — is that some of Leibovitz’s subjects have also been cast under a less flattering spotlight since the taking of these portraits, their names now tarnished, icons who’ve fallen very far from their pinnacles of influence. Harvey Weinstein, standing with his mother and brother outside an unprepossessing building in Queens, was until very recently a symbol of Hollywood power. Following allegations that he sexually harassed women for decades, he now finds himself in professional and reputational free-fall.

Myanmar’s state counselor, Aung San Suu Kyi, once a global emblem of democracy and human rights, has lost her luster thanks to her inaction in the face of immense ethnic violence and widespread atrocities committed against the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. Having met with the Nobel laureate twice myself, I have stared long and hard at Leibovitz’s portrait of her, looking for clues to her seeming change of heart since gaining political power. But what I continue to see is a woman daring us to question her at all.

Portraits” is the third in a series of books that began with “Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, 1970-1990,” followed by “A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005.” Leibovitz’s latest “revelations” are of the caliber one would only expect from a woman the Library of Congress named a “living legend.”