View to a Skill

I watched a fascinating interview between Tim Russert and Annie Leibovitz earlier this afternoon. I do wish Russert asked Leibovitz more probing questions. He skirted around her relationship with Susan Sontag, but I wanted to know more about Sontag's artistic influence on Leibovitz. After all, she had written extensively on the visual arts (her classic essay collection, On Photography, for one). For the most part, all we learned from the interview was that Sontag challenged Annie to do better work. Leibovitz is probably the foremost celebrity/personality photographer, much as Avedon and Scavullo had been a generation before. She seems to shun the mantle of celebrity for herself and appears genuinely humble and committed to the work itself.

In addition to Annie Leibovitz's portraiture, I have a great affinity for distinctive album cover art, especially that created for the full-scale, flat cardboard album covers that were the norm before being replaced by the microscopic cd recreations secured behind lifeless plastic windows. Album cover art, before then, had been tactile and viscerally oriented; different textures, die-cut renderings, vibrant colors, and fully extended, gate-folded sleeves. It is, today, an artifact of a another era.

Last year, I had an opportunity to view the small Storm Thorgerson (of the Hipgnosis graphic design studio fame) exhibit that briefly visited Chicago. Hipgnosis did much of the surreal and abstract artwork for several of the prog-rock bands in the 70s; among them, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Brand X, and Yes. It was revealing to see the original artwork in its full-scale size before it had been reproduced and reduced to album cover proportions. Among my personal favorites is the cover art for The Nice (Keith Emerson's band prior to forming ELP) album, Elegy, pictured above.

Several books have been published that have compiled the works of Storm Thorgerson and his Hipgnosis studio (which comprises a multitude of different photographers and designers). In fact, in one of those volumes, Thorgerson conveys a minutely detailed and amusing account regarding the Elegy photo shoot in the desert. The team had pre-inflated the many red balls that were used in the final shot, and transporting all those large balls to the Sahara site proved to be very challenging.

Photo courtesy of Hipgnosis/Storm Thorgerson