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Random House
November 2011
On Sale: November 8, 2011
246 pages
ISBN: 0375505083
EAN: 9780375505089
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Photography
Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could
explore with no agenda. She wasn’t on assignment. She chose
the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The
first place was Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst,
Massachusetts, which Leibovitz visited with a small digital
camera. A few months later, she went with her three young
children to Niagara Falls. “That’s when I started making
lists,” she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and
Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund
Freud’s final home, in London, but most of the places on the
lists were American. The work became more ambitious as
Leibovitz discovered that she wanted to photograph objects
as well as rooms and landscapes. She began to use more
sophisticated cameras and a tripod and to travel with an
assistant, but the project remained personal. Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of
Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Once she got there, she was
drawn into the wider world of the Concord writers. Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s home and Orchard House, where Louisa May
Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The
Massachusetts studio of the Beaux Arts sculptor Daniel
Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln
Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and
to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln’s
portraits have been saved. Lincoln’s
portraitists—principally Alexander Gardner and the
photographers in Mathew Brady’s studio—were also the men
whose work at the Gettysburg battlefield established the
foundation for war photography. At almost exactly the same
time, in a remote, primitive studio on the Isle of Wight,
Julia Margaret Cameron was developing her own ultimately
influential style of portraiture. Leibovitz made two trips
to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to the other
photographer on her list, Ansel Adams, she explored the
trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for
fifty years. The final list of subjects is perhaps a bit eccentric.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis
Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery
gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative
project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her
own. “From the beginning, when I was watching my children
stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in
renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”
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