Columbia Museum of Art will display a stunning exhibition by Annie Leibovitz, one of America’s best-known living photographers, starting in October and extending to January. “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage,” an exhibit including 78 photographs, is an evocative and deeply personal statement by a photographer whose career spans more than 40 years. It encompasses a broad range of subject matters as well as historical and stylistic influences. This work displays Leibovitz’s strongest talent as she shapes a narrative of history that informs the present.
While creating this extensive work of art, Leibovitz explored places with no agenda, not adhering to a specific assignment but choosing subjects because of their meaning to her. “This project was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”
The first place Leibovitz visited was Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, Mass. She then travelled to Niagara Falls with her three young children, followed by visits to the houses of Virgina Woolf and Charles Darwin, as well as Sigmund Freud’s final home in London. She also visited the homes of many other iconic figures such as Elvis Presley, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott and Pete Seeger. Although there are no people present in these photographs, the pictures are portraits of subjects that have shaped Leibovitz’s distinctly American view of her cultural inheritance. During this journey, she let her instincts and intuitions guide her to related subjects – hence the title, “Pilgrimage.”
