Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage

Unlike her staged and carefully lit portraits made on assignment for magazines and advertising clients, the photographs in this exhibition were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject. No living celebrities are portrayed in Pilgrimage.

But celebrated figures from the past are indirectly represented, from Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson to Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Smithson. The images speak in a commonplace language to the photographer’s curiosity about the world she inherited, spanning landscapes both dramatic and quiet, interiors of living rooms and bedrooms, and objects that are talismans of past lives.

The exhibition, which includes 70 photographs taken between April 2009 and May 2011, is organized for the Smithsonian American Art Museum by guest curator Andy Grundberg, former New York Times photography critic and associate provost and dean of undergraduate studies at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Joann Moser, deputy chief curator, is the coordinating curator at the museum.

For more information, please visit New York Historical Society