Arts & Photography - Books

Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

In 1977, when Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, asked me to prepare a fifty-page portfolio of my pictures for the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine, I decided not to simply make a selection of photographs that had been published. I looked at everything I had done since I started working. It was a revelation. For one thing, I had no idea that I had accumulated so many photographs. You lose track of them when you?re working every day. And you see the work in a different way when you look at it from the distance of time. You get a sense of where you are going. You start to see a life.

I had the opportunity to edit my work most thoroughly when I prepared two retrospective books, Annie Leibovitz: 1970?1990 and A Photographer?s Life: 1990?2005. It was thrilling to see that first book laid out chronologically. To see the pictures historically. The second book, A Photographer?s Life, was assembled immediately after the death of Susan Sontag and my father. Editing the book took me through the grieving process.

The books are pure. They are mine. The magazines I work for don?t belong to me. It?s the editor?s magazine, and the editor has every right to use the material the way he or she wants to. It isn?t just that art directors and editors at magazines make selections that I wouldn?t necessarily make. Which they sometimes do. Or that they run pictures too small. Or that they put so much type on the pictures that you can?t see them anymore. Magazines have quite specific needs. It?s a collaboration only so far, which is true of almost all assignment work.

When I began working on my new book, I thought it would be a pamphlet of maybe forty pages or so. I intended to take ten of my photographs and dissect them. They didn?t have to be my most famous pictures, just pictures that I cared about. But as I began going through the material I realized that I might as well be more ambitious. I started to think that I would try to answer every single question anyone has ever asked about how my work is done. To defuse the mystery, and the misconceptions. To explain that it?s nothing more than work. And learning how to see.

So my forty-page pamphlet became a 240-page book with over a hundred photographs in it. It is written for someone like the person I was at the beginning of my career, when I was in art school. A young me. I didn?t know which road I would take. Whether it would be a commercial road, a magazine road, an artistic road, a journalistic road. It?s written for that person. Someone who is interested in photography but isn?t sure how they want to use it.

The book is more emotional than I had imagined it would be. But, most importantly, it is my edit. No one is going to care about, or understand, your work the way you do, and if you are going to explain it you have to be able to present it the way you want to. That?s what a book can do better than any other medium.

See Annie Leibovitz's 15 favorite photography books.

(Photo credit Paul Gilmore)

The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary.

"You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative."

It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously.

The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional.

As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity.

Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.

Author: Frank Warren
Hardcover:  288 pages
Company: William Morrow  (2005-12-01) (2005-11-29)
ISBN: 0060899190
List Price: $26.95
Amazon Price: 
Used Price: $14.89

The award-winning PostSecret project's most profound and stunning postcards to date

For the past three years Frank Warren has invited people of all backgrounds and nationalities to send him creatively decorated postcards bearing secrets they have never before revealed. He has shared these PostSecrets on his award-winning blog, www.PostSecret.com, in an internationally traveling art exhibit, and in three electrifying books: the bestselling PostSecret, My Secret, and The Secret Lives of Men and Women.

Now, in his most extraordinary book yet, Warren again delves into our collective confessions, presenting a never-before-seen selection of provocative and moving PostSecrets. A Lifetime of Secrets lays bare our private fears, hopes, regrets, and desires, from people as young as eight and as old as eighty. From painful admissions of infidelity to breathtaking revelations and endearing sentiments, Warren's latest collection will shock and move readers of every age, revealing secrets that have haunted their creators for a lifetime.

Six PostSecrets from A Lifetime of Secrets

Here are six of the PostSecrets included in A Lifetime of Secrets, and never before seen online. Click on each image to see a larger version.

Frank Warren's Introduction to A Lifetime of Secrets

When I told my father I was collecting secrets from strangers for an art project, he didn?t know what to think. I tried to explain how the thousands of secrets that had been mailed to me were more than mere confessions. They could be beautiful, funny, sorrowful, inspiring.

"But, Frank," he asked, "why are you soliciting secrets from strangers, and why would anyone tell you a real secret?"

I invited my father to fly out for a PostSecret art exhibit in Washington, D.C., where hundreds of the postcards were on display. More than 15,000 people came to see the secrets, and my father was there, day after day, to hear many of their transformative stories. Some people told me they recognized a hidden part of themselves on a stranger?s postcard. Others shared personal experiences of how talking about a painful secret had helped heal a lifelong relationship.

The exhibit came to an end and I took my father back to the airport to catch a red-eye flight home. During our drive we passed through a long dark stretch of highway when my father broke the silence by asking me, "Do you want to know my secret?" He bravely recounted a traumatic childhood experience. When he finished, we had a true talk that gave me a richer understanding of my father and recast our relationship.

? ? ?

For A Lifetime of Secrets, the fourth PostSecret book, I've selected postcards that show how secrets can reveal a momentary impulse or haunt us for decades and arranged them by age to follow the common journey we all take through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, maturity. Stretched over a full lifespan, the secrets expose the meaningful ways we change over time, and the surprising ways we don't.

The postcards narrate childhood stories that have never been spoken; they voice the guarded confessions of our parents and grandparents. They confirm that our rich interior lives are not defined by how old we are, and that with aging comes not only loss but also the possibility of grace and wisdom.

The following two secrets arrived in my mailbox the same week. The postmarks on each card were different, but when I posted them together on the PostSecret website (www.postsecret.com) they seemed as though they could have been written by the same person at two different points in her life.

I am a junior in high school. I have good friends and a loving family. I am smart. I am a good athlete and musician. But I would trade all that in if it meant I would be beautiful.

I spent my high school years believing I was UGLY. I just went through a photo album that had pictures of me over the last 20 years. Turns out I was/am kind of cute. No more wasting time on thinking otherwise.

When I give PostSecret presentations at college campuses, my hope is that people I have never met will be inspired to change their lives through the secrets and stories being shared. Not long ago, at one of my talks, it was my life that was changed, and the secret that inspired me came from a stranger in the front row.

I began my presentation by handing out blank postcards to everyone in the auditorium. I invited each person to anonymously write down a secret on a card and then pass it on. For the next hour, the postcards circulated and were read silently multiple times. At the end of my talk, I asked if anyone would like to stand and read the secret they were holding at that moment. A man in the front row stood up and haltingly read:

I wish I could apologize to my younger brother for the way I treated him growing up.

His postcard was blank.

I have witnessed many times how the courage of sharing a secret can be contagious. When I realized that the man had been pretending to read someone else?s secret and that the person he had left with was likely his brother, I was inspired.

Growing up, I was not an ideal older brother. As an adult, I have wished for an opportunity to apologize for some of my actions but did not want to open old wounds. I have not shared this secret with my brother . . . until now.

--Frank Warren

Author: Frank Warren
Hardcover:  288 pages
Company: William Morrow  (2007-10-01) (2007-10-09)
ISBN: 0061238600
List Price: $28.95
Amazon Price: 
Used Price: $14.90