My books usually come from an edit of the work of a particular time. Or they are special projects. Most of them are pretty conventional. Big but not too big. I hadn't thought about doing anything else until one day when the German publisher Benedikt Taschen came to me and said he wanted to publish my pictures in a limited-edition volume like the one he had made in 1999 with Helmut Newton. Helmut's book was called Sumo. Benedikt said that Sumo was literally the biggest book, size-wise, published in the 20th century.
I was intrigued. I had just finished making a special edition of very large prints, so I was feeling more open to this idea than I might have been in the past. Seeing those big prints had been a revelation. As I thought more about what Benedikt was suggesting, I realized that not only would it not be like any of my other books but … it wasn't really a book at all. It was more like an installation. A piece of sculpture. But what photographs would work in it? There should be some unifying thread. And what happened when I began looking at pictures that I had pinned to a wall was that “performance” emerged as a theme. As I added more pictures, “power” and “money” also emerged, but I lightened up on them. The book became playful. Performance and role-playing were the constants.
Sorting this all out took longer than Benedikt and I had planned, and in the meantime he published another big limited-edition book of photographs: Sebastião Salgado's Genesis, which came out last year. So my book is the third “sumo” book. It is over two and a half feet tall and weighs 57 pounds. Marc Newson designed a table for it. I like the idea that you can leave the book open to a page and let it stand on the table for days and then change it. It's a collection of prints, although there are rhymes in the pagination. There are riffs. The first two pictures in the book, the color portrait of Queen Elizabeth made at Buckingham Palace in 2007 and the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon's helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after Nixon had resigned as president, in 1974, were placed where they are because I began thinking of them as bookends for my entire career. The Nixon picture is something of an anomaly in the book because it wasn't staged. Reality is often stranger than fiction. That's always in the back of my mind. My set-up pictures are loosely based on some kind of reality. I borrow elements from real life.
The pictures from my book Pilgrimage, which have no people in them, might seem strange choices to put in this book, but to me they are portraits. The people are gone now, but their presence resonates. The picture of Elvis's TV set with the bullet hole in it is placed near a portrait of Donald Trump. There's something about power and anger going on there. Virginia Woolf's stained and scarred writing desk is near Joan Didion's portrait. That desk says something about art. Art is messy. And it's hard.
Adapted from Annie Leibovitz, by Annie Leibovitz, to be published this month by Taschen; © 2014 by the author.
