Where in the world am I today?: At Sea Aboard the Grand Princess
When I saw the trailer for this documentary a few months ago I was intrigued and eventually tracked down a copy at our local library. Annie Leibovitz has had an effect on me for years because along with loving the feeling of being on stage and performing, I love the process of crafting the look and feel that goes into promoting a show and somewhere inside myself have a strong desire to capture and chronicle the journey I’m living… A ton of these sentiments were echoed in the documentary about a celebrity photographer who helped turn portraiture into pop culture.
I think for any performer looking at promoting their work through still images, having a look at a book of Annie Leibovitz’s work will give you some wonderful ideas of how to craft a shot that will tell more to a potential client than just what you look like. Through her work for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue and others, Annie has been given license to craft images that seem to leap off the page.
There’s a wonderful moment in the documentary when a photo critic makes a comment about Annie’s work and says something to the effect that although some pictures can tell a story, many of Annie’s pictures are one-liners… The critic almost sounds cynical when she delivers the comment, but for me, a quality one-liner beats a book of a thousand pages, if the one liner is remembered.
Often, when your promotional material rolls across the desk of a potential client, you’re only given about the same amount of time that you’d get to tell your one-liner. If you don’t strike a chord on some level in that first ten to fifteen seconds you may never get a second chance, so that first impression has to be a lasting one.
The documentary dose a pretty great job of capturing the life of an artist, both the triumphs as well as the disappointments. Beyond the work though there’s a sense while watching the piece that you’re seeing the challenges faced when trying to juggle career with personal relationships and the need for one’s own life and interests in the middle of it all. In her relentless pursuit for quality I was touched by the enthusiasm she has for her craft and yet an occasional sense that on some assignments she feels like a bit of an impostor. Going from shooting Rock and Roll one day to shooting Fashion the next and not necessarily feeling like she had the tools at her disposal to pull it off echoed for me the feelings I had when I went from being a performer at festivals and fairs to working on cruise ships.
Artist, celebrity, enthusiastic creator of images that have embedded themselves in our pop culture, Annie Leibovitz is all of these and I enjoyed this documentary as it gave me a window into her world.
