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Annie Leibovitz

at Work

Annie Leibovitz

Random House: 240 pp., $40

Do we really need another book by Annie Leibovitz? That's what I asked myself as I began reading her newest volume, "Annie Leibovitz at Work." Her pictures are so well known, and she has collected them so many times, in so many different formats. Just a couple of years ago, two different friends gave me copies of "A Photographer's Life," her large-format catalog of images from 1990-2005. At the time, I sighed and wondered what all the fuss was about. But dipping into those images, I found that combination of stillness and silliness, of sweetness and irony, that makes her pictures so compelling. I don't want to like them as much as I do.

But do we really need another collection of hits from someone already so familiar? After all, is there any other photographer in America who is herself such a star, even when she is hanging out with our biggest celebrities? As a young artist in San Francisco in the late 1960s, Leibovitz was studying painting with the male modernists who were throwing their egos and their angst onto canvases. She took night classes in photography and tells us that she was too impatient to stick with painting. "Painting was isolating," she writes, and she wanted to be socialized. Boy, did she get her wish.

If you wanted to overcome artistic isolation in the late 1960s, then the rock-'n'-roll life was the ticket. Annie got what now seems like the dream job, shooting pictures for Rolling Stone. Her photos were published while she was still a student. She got the beat, the energy of the era, and her pictures appeared at exactly the right time. And that's been the story of her career as photographer: She catches the wave but is never too far ahead of the curve. She has nerve, to be sure, and her famous pictures of Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, or of the gloriously pregnant Demi Moore, have become iconic without having been obvious. She didn't push the envelope, though; she just seemed to know exactly when to mail it in. She isn't the first to show that timing is everything in photography, but she is among those great glossy picture-makers whose timing is impeccable.