Pilgrimage: a personal journey

I’ve always admired Annie Leibovitz. She’s probably the most famous living photographer today and for good reason. She’s shot for Rolling Stone and later Vanity Fair. But Pilgrimage, a collection of her personal images which came out sometime around 2011, came to my attention recently and I’m equally impressed.

Pilgrimage is a collection of images gathered mostly across the US — and a few internationally — that attracted her attention for entirely personal reasons. No one paid her to visit these locations. She was not on assignment. The images are the results of her own personal interest and passion. She visited these places out of curiosity and without a fixed agenda. They commonly-known landscapes as well as personal objects from famous people, including Emily Dickinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elvis Presley, Annie Oakley, Pete Seeger, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and a few others.

Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote the introduction. As a historian and writer, she is in a good position to understand the importance of the people who captured Annie’s attention. A few thoughts strike me as I leaf through the images. First, there is beauty to be found in the everyday. Most photographers know this, but it’s encouraging to see how well someone like Annie Leibovitz can do with relatively little equipment. She simply kept her eye open and made time to record what struck her interest. Annie did exactly this with a close-up of a white dress worn by Emily Dickinson.

I was struck by another thought that Annie expressed in the text that accompanies the images. She took many of the pictures without being entirely sure what she wanted from them. The end became clear as she worked through them, however, which is a good lesson for other artists struggling with their own ideas.