Memorable Photos From Annie Leibovitz’s Traveling Exhibit, “Women: New Portraits”
Photo: Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz1/5Patti Smith, musician, writer, artist, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, 2016
She has been making music and art since the early 1970s, when she stood in front of her band in skinny jeans and a ripped T-shirt, giving ecstatic, charismatic, profane performances that merged poetry and rock ’n’ roll. Downtown New York clubs were her natural milieu, but in 1975 she made an album for a major record label. This was Horses, which is now pretty unanimously considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time. In the cover photograph, taken by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, she gazes out insolently, her black jacket tossed over the shoulder of a white man’s shirt. She has had only one Top 40 hit—“Because the Night”—in a long career, but her influence has been significant, on fashion as well as music. She has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and won the 2010 National Book Award for Just Kids, a memoir of her relationship with Mapplethorpe. For the fortieth anniversary of Horses, she and the band performed live versions around the world.
Photo: Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz2/5Denise and Linamandla Manong, pediatric-AIDS health-care worker and her daughter, Khayelitsha township, Western Cape, South Africa, 2014
A grassroots, African-based organization called mothers2mothers is having great success reducing the number of babies born HIV positive. Denise is living with HIV, but her children are not. When she became pregnant and discovered that she was infected with the virus, she was put on a drug-treatment regimen that kept her healthy and prevented the transmission of HIV to her baby. A Mentor Mother, a local woman who was also HIV positive and who was employed and trained by mothers2mothers, supplied the support and advice that overburdened health-care facilities could not. After the birth of her daughter, Denise herself became one of more than 1,000 Mentor Mothers in sub-Saharan Africa who have helped to virtually eliminate HIV in babies born in the mothers2mothers program.
Photo: Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz3/5Andrea Medina Rosas, women’s rights lawyer, Chimalhuacán, Mexico, 2016
Her mother is a feminist who founded a women’s rights organization when Andrea was a teenager. The first woman who came to them for help was a victim of domestic violence. That was the beginning of Andrea’s involvement in the defense of victims of sexual violence and also the protection of their defenders. The watershed event for Mexican feminists of Andrea’s generation was the recognition, starting in the early 1990s, that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young women in and near Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, were being abducted, tortured, and murdered. Andrea was a member of the litigating team in what became known as the Campo Algodonero case, which was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007. Campo Algodonero is an abandoned cotton field in Ciudad Juárez where the bodies of eight young women were found. The case was brought against the government of Mexico for violating its human rights obligations to investigate, prosecute, and prevent crimes against women and girls. In 2009, the plaintiffs won. The Mexican state was required to comply with a broad set of remedial measures, including reopening investigations into disappearances, providing reparations to the families of victims, and developing a clear set of procedures for assuring human rights for women. Andrea was photographed in the municipality of Chimalhuacán, which is part of the greater Mexico City urban area. She is standing near a spot where pink crosses are erected to memorialize the murdered women whose bodies have been found there.
Photo: Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz4/5Alexandra Fuller, writer, Kelly, Wyoming, 2016
She grew up in what was then Rhodesia—later Zimbabwe—in the 1970s, during the brutal civil war that ended in the defeat of the white government. Fuller’s parents were British farmers who stayed in Africa after they lost their land. When she was in her early 20s, she married an American who was working as a river guide on the Zambezi River. They moved to Wyoming, where she raised three children and began writing. Her books, which include the memoirs Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001) and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (2011), take a precise and personal approach to issues such as racism and segregation. She is an uninhibited witness, both wry and poetic in her account of a childhood in which spitting cobras in the pantry, malaria, alcoholism, and land mines were taken for granted, along with the fierce beauty of the country and the complex passions of her eccentric mother and father.
Photo: Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz5/5James Franco, actor, director, producer, artist, writer, and Marina Abramović, performance artist, New York City, 2016
The body is Marina Abramović’s subject. Her work inflicts all kinds of ordeals and mortifications on her own flesh. She has ingested antipsychotic drugs that caused temporary catatonia, hurled herself at walls, passed out and nearly died in a ring of flames, cut a five-pointed star into her abdomen with a razor blade, and let an audience do anything they wanted to her for six hours, including possibly shooting her. In 1997 she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for a performance in which for four days she scrubbed bloody and maggot-infested cow bones in a basement. For 77 days in 2010, she sat immobile for eight to ten hours in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, gazing at spectators, one at a time, who waited in line to be able to sit across from her. Hundreds of thousands of people lined up, some of them overnight, to get a chance to participate. She has just written a memoir, Walk Through Walls. This photograph is a work in progress.
