The exhibition “Annie Leibovitz – A Photographer's Life 1990 – 2005”at KUNST HAUS WIEN offers an unusual glimpse of the oeuvre of one of the most famous portrait photographers of our time. In addition to her portraits of famous personages, which have long since become icons of photographic art, the 150 works on display include photographs from Leibovitz's private life that have never been exhibited before. The result is a unique chronology, a composite of family album, diary and assignment work. The exhibition was organised by the Brooklyn Museum, New York and is being sponsored by American Express.

Portraits of artists and politicians such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, William S. Burroughs, Demi Moore, Bill Clinton, Agnes Martin, Mick Jagger, Matthew Barney, Chuck Close, Robert de Niro and Scarlett Johansson form one core of the exhibition. Scenes from the photographer’s private life – the births of her three daughters, or the illness and death of Leibovitz's father – are juxtaposed with landscape photography, e.g. from the USA or Jordan, and reportages such as the one Leibvoitz did on the siege of Sarajevo.

Annie Leibovitz’s photographs for magazines have chronicled American popular culture since the 1970s. The photographer sees her work, which has been displayed in numerous museums throughout the world, as a unified whole: “I don't have two lives,” Leibovitz says. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” The current exhibition follows up on KUNST HAUS WIEN’s first presentation of works by Annie Leibovitz in 1993, which showed photographs created during the years 1970 to 1990.

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