Master Lens: Anne Leibovitz and James Nachtwey

This post is going to talk about two of the most important photographers in the world: Anne Leibovitz and James Nachtwey. They are living legends in their fields, but while both tell stories through visuals and have run extraordinary succesful careers, the targets at which they point their lens and the stories they tell are radically different.


James Nachtwey is considered by most people the best war photographer in the world. While he was a student, during the 60s, we was moved by the pictures in the civil rights movements and conflicts like Vietnam War. "Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers another." And he believed the photographers, so milions of people did, awakening a global conscience upon how silent the injustices in the world had remained. In his words, "I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer. But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost be by definition an anti-war photograph." During all his career he has tried to show conflicts from the victim's point of view, he defends the importance of visual journalism in war saying that "it gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice." His works try to show war from the frontline, from ground zero, through the eyes of the people involved; serving moving high doses of raw reality. He believes in the power of documentary journalism and its role in the resolution of conflicts through the influence on public opinion and its depth in collective consciousness.

Kosovo 1999 - Imprint of a man killed by Serbs ©James Nachtwey

"The image reminded me of a cave painting, and echoed how primitive we still are in so many ways."

He has been documenting war conflicts and social issues in more than 30 countries, travelling all around the world working in South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and The Balkans, the Middle East, South East Asia but also finding the conflict right out of his office's window in New York on 9/11.

In his effort to get the closest shot and the most direct testimony he has had to learn how to deal with his anger when witnessing injustice and tragedy as well as how to deal with fear when he has found himself working in the middle of chaos, in the heat of battle. Even though in times of war humanity stands in the background too often, in the documentary film War Photographer he claims he has always tried to have a personal and respectful relation with the people he has photographed, explaining the reason why he was there and asking for consentment and collaboration to tell the story through pictures. However, he has insistently tried to be invisible, purely objective, extracting himself from the facts he reveals in his works. The absence of personal impressions allows the public to put to draw their own opinions and conclusions from the primary source instead of doing so through the filter of the journalist's experience or point of view, which makes Nachtwey's photographies closer and moving.

Personally, one of the pictures that have impacted me the most is this one, taken in Sudan in 1993:

Sudan, 1993 - Famine victim in a feeding center.

"This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up, and if he hadn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope?"

*Quotes borrowed from the 2007 TED Prize accepting speech.
*Images borrowed from James Nachtwey's official website.


Annie Leibovitz is another master photographer. She aims her camera to other kind of people, she got specialised in portraits of famous people, and while she tells radically different stories, but she has made herself one of the best in her field. In her case we can se an evolution of her style, as the years went by she has changed the way she takes pictures. The final product is a very personal style in portraiting people.

Fun fact #999: Leibovitz looks through her
camera with the left eye, so the photographer
John Keatley found interesting to portrait
her in this pose.

From an early age she had close contact with photography as her mother was a prolific documentarist of all the trips the whole family did during her childhood due to her father's duty assignments in the U.S. Air Force. She studied art in San Francisco, and started her photographer career in 1970 when she entered the recently lauched Rolling Stone magazine. The magazine got bigger as San Francisco's Rock and Roll bands "love generation" rose and grew. A few years later became the chief photographer, defining the visual style of the of the magazine.

Mick Jagger in the elevator. Leibovitz's favourite picture from 1975s
Americas Tour with The Rolling Stones

In that moment in her career she had something in common with James Nachtwey's style, the way to aproach and show the subjects she was photographying. As Nachtwey knows the conflicts he gets into and takes the risks, she used to get to know quite well the person she was working with, even spent some time with them and even living like them, as she did in 1975s Rolling Stones Americas Tour. Both intent to make themself invisible in order to capture people's real personality ignoring the fact there was a camera there. In order to become "the photographer of the rock stars", she lived like a rock star. One of the last works of that period of her life and one of the most important and famous in her career was John Lennon and Yoko Ono's textless cover in 1980 (picture on the left), which were the last pictures of Lennon, taken 5 hours before he was killed.

But in the 80s she changed the direction of her career. She quit Rolling Stone job, went to rehab to solve her problems with drugs and did research on the different techniques known and other photographer's works. She started working for Vanity Fair, and her style shifted significantly as she started playing with light, colors, poses and atrezzo. The result is a personal and unmistakable style that has enshrined her as probably the most important celebrities portrait photographer. She has even photographed the Queen of England! (Right picture) Just by being photographed by Annie Leibovitz means your career as an artist is a sure thing. She has an extraordinary ability to "humanize" celebrities, showing their real personalities.

In the last few years she has collaborated with Vogue and has published some other works like the spectacular Disney Parks Promotion "Dream Portraits".

Scarlett Johansson as the Disney Princess Cinderella. Image borrowed from ABC News