Wertheimer’s exhibition Elvis at 21, organized by the Smithsonian Institute Traveling Exhibition Service and Govinda Gallery, is currently at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama through December 4th, 2011. It then travels to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, Virginia, where the Kiss photo was taken at the Mosque Theatre. Elvis at 21 opens December 24th at VMFA. The Kiss photo can be seen in the SITES exhibition and it looks amazing!

It is interesting to note that Barbara Gray decided to come forward after seeing a story about Wertheimer’s Elvis at 21 exhibition in USA Today.

Copyright © Alfred Wertheimer. All Rights Reserved.

Here is the story for you to enjoy:

Mick Rock first exhibited his photographs at Govinda Gallery in June of 2002 in his extraordinary show Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust and Other Photographs. His work is featured in the upcoming museum exhibition Sound and Vision: Monumental Rock Photography, at the Columbus Museum of Fine Art in Columbus, Georgia beginning December 10th.

Here is the cover of The Saatchi Gallery Magazine for you to enjoy:
The Saatchi Gallery Magazine, Art & Music, Issue 13, Spring 2011.

Leonard attended his opening at Govinda Gallery in 1996, traveling to Washington from his home in New Orleans. Leonard’s book Jazz Memories was available at the gallery during the opening, and he happily signed every copy in stock.

The cover of Herman Leonard’s book Jazz Memories. Copyright © Filipacchi Editions. All Rights Reserved.

There was a great after party for Leonard at Carol Gray’s home in Georgetown. The lively evening ended with an arm-wrestling contest, the final round pairing collector and decorator Carol Gray against artist Carlotta Hester. Hester was declared the winner, with Herman Leonard as the judge.

Richard Harrington’s feature story in The Washington Post (September 11th, 1996) about Herman Leonard and his exhibition at Govinda is a great summary of the photographer’s life and work. We present Harrington’s story for you here in The Back Room.

On The Beat

Box of Negatives Is a Positive Jazz Treasure

Wednesday, September 11, 1996

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer

People don’t always realize when they’ve been in the middle of a historical moment. For photographer Herman Leonard, it took almost 30 years to reconnect to a key period in jazz history, one he had actually captured on film- and then forgotten.

“Does one ever know?” Leonard asked recently from New Orleans, where he has been working on a book about the birthplace of jazz. Forty years earlier, Leonard was in another city, New York, just as it was birthing a new form of jazz called bebop, carrying a heavy Speed Graphic to clubs in Harlem and on 52nd Street while capturing images of young adventurers named Parker, Gillespie, Blakey and Monk.

Saxaphonist Dexter Gordon in 1948 at New York City’s Royal Roost. Copyright © Herman Leonard. All Rights Reserved.

“I was just having a ball,” Leonard notes. “I loved what I was listening to, and I used the camera to get in free and photograph people I liked. By coincidence, it happened to be around the time Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker brought about the bebop movement, but I didn’t know they would turn things around musically.”

“When I was photographing Monk and Parker and these other innovators, I had no idea that later on they’d be looked back upon as being icons. Had I known, my God, I would have shot a hell of a lot more pictures!”

“Photography You Can Hear,” featuring the work of Herman Leonard, opens tomorrow at Georgetown’s Govinda Gallery (Herman Leonard will be on hand for the opening). What’s remarkable about the show is that for 30 years, Leonard’s classic black-and-white images of the bebop generation, as well as portraits of older giants like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum and Louis Armstrong, sat undisturbed beneath a bed in a box that was at various times in the South Pacific, France, Spain and England.

Leonard, who shot his jazz subjects from 1947 to 1960, made his living as a commercial photographer in the fashion and advertising industries. Once in a while, he says, a jazz magazine might purchase a picture “to accompany some article if they knew I had a shot of some particular musician. But at that point, Down Beat [the leading jazz magazine] was paying 10 dollars per photo. There was no living off of that, so I had to do other things.”

When he’d first gone to Ohio University in Athens in 1940, Leonard recalls, “I was an aspiring young actor,” and working in theater may have been the inspiration for his distinctive portrait style- Leonard’s photos are often back-lit, full of swirling smoke and other evocative detail. “I spent a lot of time backstage looking at the audience, and from there practically everything is back-lit. I noticed that when figures moved across the stage lit the way they were, they stood out sharply against the dark back- ground of the audience. I was always impressed with the graphic imagery of that particular kind of lighting.”

In fact, while that technique would give Leonard’s photos their emotional power, he started using it by accident: When a big band came to Ohio University, Leonard asked trumpeter Ray Wetzel to pose for a portrait. “One of the front lights didn’t fire and I had only the back light- but I got exactly what I’d seen from backstage. I said, “That’s it, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.”

However, Leonard’s breakthrough was interrupted by World War II, as he was drafted and sent to the South Pacific. After returning to Ohio and graduating in 1947 with a fine-arts degree in photography, Leonard had an apprenticeship with Yousuf Karsh, considered by many the greatest portrait photographer of this century.

“I loaded the film, went to sessions, adjusted the light according to his direction,” Leonard recalls with unmistakable warmth and respect. “Anybody spending time with that man, watching him work with the people that he photographed, cannot help but be influenced. Talk about diplomacy and flexibility in dealing with the person in front of you- he should have been the president of the world!”

Lady Day at Night: Herman Leonard’s 1949 portrait of singer Billie Holiday in New York City. Copyright © Herman Leonard. All Rights Reserved.

Unlike the elaborate and “informal” formality of Karsh portraiture, Leonard’s photos are defined more by action. For instance, his classic image of Art Blakey, shot in 1958, captures not only the drummer’s aura of perpetually energized motion but also the ecstatic spirituality at the core of his music. Because there were no editorial expectations or constraints- Leonard’s pictures were a private pleasure – there was no subtle positioning or direction.

Duke Ellington, Paris 1958. Copyright © Herman Leonard. All Rights Reserved.

“I never told a musician to turn to the right or left, I simply waited,” Leonard says. “I did not want to alter the feeling, the mood, or the attitude of what I was photographing.”

In 1956, Leonard went to work as Marlon Brando’s personal photographer as the actor was looking to set up a film company in the South Pacific. This was long before shooting Brando would require a wide-angle lens- “he was slim and slender and beautiful then,” Leonard points out- but nothing ever came of the film company. Later that year, Leonard moved to Paris, working first for a major French record label and subsequently in fashion and advertising. By 1960, he’d stopped photographing the jazz men and women who came to Paris “because I didn’t have the time.”

Leonard didn’t even keep any prints- the jazz-era negatives were stuffed in a box and kept under his bed, where they languished until 1987. By that time, Leonard and his family had moved to the Spanish island of Ibiza and finally to London.

“I had no sense of what they meant,” he admits. “In fact, because I’d shot them for myself personally, I didn’t think they had any commercial or retail value of any kind. Nor did I attach much historical value to them because I knew there were others around who had photographed the same people.”

When Leonard pulled the well-traveled box out from under the bed, he was, he says, in a state of total depression. “I was flat broke, with a family on my hands, and here’s a bunch of old negatives, misfiled, with no prints.” Leonard then experienced another setback. “I was turned down by all the best galleries in London, and then picked up by a very little one in Portobello Road. And from there on, it was a different story.”

Leonard’s first show, in 1988, was widely heralded by critics, and the exhibition was attended by more than 10,000 people. For Leonard, the only disappointment was learning that somewhere along the line, he’d lost almost 50 percent of his treasure trove (he kept finding old contact sheets for which no negatives existed, including pictures of Frank Sinatra, Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk.) “I have very few of Monk,” Leonard says regretfully, “but I’ve got what I’ve got and I’m grateful for it.”

So are jazz fans.

Copyright © Andy Warhol. All Rights Reserved.

“Andy Warhol is an expert on fabricated myths. In fact, he is one. As a commercial artist in his early years, he designed advertising campaigns not only for I. Miller shoes and NBC, but for on of the most saleable items in mid-20th-century America: himself. “Ads,” his new portfolio of 10 silkscreen prints at Govinda Gallery in Georgetown, marks a return to this world, which he so fondly understands.

Warhol-now appearing in the TV Coke commercials-has taken as his subject matter magazine advertisements from the 50′s: Ronald Reagan touting Van Heusen’s “won’t wrinkle ever!” drip-dry shirts; Judy Garland wearing a “what becomes a legend most” Blackglama mink coat; Mobil’s now grounded flying red horse.

It is a show that’s easy to like, thanks in a large part to Warhol himself. For years, he’s been rubbing our noses in popular culture, forcing us to look hard at images we’d become inured to, from Campbell’s soup cans to electric chairs. Because he’s been so noncommittal as to the point of these provocative images, people have been forced to think for themselves and extrapolate meanings. In the process (and with the help of many other Pop artists) we’ve become more visually aware-and skeptical-about commercial attempts to seduce us with fabricated myths.

There is inevitably an element of nostalgia in these ads for products and movies from the past, such as the deliciously colored, five-cent Life Savers as that reads “please do not lick this page!” But there is irony as well as poignancy in the Warholized figure of James Dean in a blood-red poster advertising “Rebel Without a Cause”- in Japanese; and the legendary Judy Garland, appropriately rendered in black-and-blue as she models mink.

The most uncannily timely as is that of the “won’t wrinkle ever!” Ronald Reagan in a drip-dry Van Heusen shirt, with the line at the bottom crediting his then-latest film: “Law and Order.” The image has been tipped slightly to give the appearance of a movie freeze-frame-something that did not happen in the original ad. Warhol reveals his wit and sense of irony in the way he has altered this and other images, though ever so slightly. In all of them, he caresses the image with his nervous line-a classic part of the Warholizing process.

Also on view is another new Warhol series: four silkscreen variations on Cologne cathedral, with diamond dust adding glitter. They were published in Germany in an edition of 60. The black-on-black is perhaps the most haunting, given the dark history of the cathedral during World War II.

The “Ads” portfolio, printed in an edition of 190, was commissioned by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. This print show-one of Warhol’s best and most approachable in recent years-will continue at Govinda, 1227 34th St. NW, through June 30. Hours are 11 till 4 Tuesdays through Saturdays.”

The Govinda Gallery invitation to Andy Warhol’s “Ads” exhibition, May 23 through June 30, 1985:

Copyright © Andy Warhol. All Rights Reserved.

Photo Copyright © Chris Murray. All Rights Reserved.
Exhibition curator Nicholas Posada (Tale) paints a bench for Govinda Gallery.

Photo Copyright © Dave Murray. All Rights Reserved.
Govinda Gallery director Chris Murray stands in front of Washington D.C.’s “wall of fame” in the train tunnel at L’Enfant Plaza.

— Tale

The Washington Post, Thursday, February 22, 2001

Graffiti at Govinda: Coming In off the Street

By Nicole M. Miller, Washington Post Staff Writer

Nicholas Posada took a tour of some of his artistic handiwork last week. The first stop was behind a commercial building on U Street, another was down an alley off 16th Street NW, then under the P Street bridge east of Dupont Circle.

For five years, Posada, 21, has been spray-painting in the Washington area – sometimes with a building owner’s permission, most times not. Graffiti is illegal in the District of Columbia.

But Posada and his work recently landed in Georgetown – legitimately. His and the works of five other area graffiti artists are on display at Govinda Gallery.

“It really is a genre,” says gallery owner Chris Murray. “They’re all street taggers.”

Murray wanted to host a graffiti show, in part, to give the artists a legal venue, but he also defends their painting on the streets. He believes they choose appropriate locations.

“It’s in places that frankly look better,” Murray says. “Technically, whether it’s legal or illegal, to me it looks good.”

Murray met Posada at the gallery two years ago at a surprise party for Murray’s son’s 16th birthday. He found Posada poring over art books in the back room; they started talking about the gallery and graffiti art.

A year later they firmed up the dates for a show, and Posada rallied five other artists to participate. The five – Johnny Real, Sest, Seik, SMK, and Vove – simply use their “tags” in the show.

“These are the people who I respect the most,” Posada says. The show, he adds, is only a “reflection of graffiti.”

“You can’t capture graffiti in a gallery – graffiti is under the bridge,” says Posada, who looks rather clean-cut with his short brown hair, Tommy Hilfiger jacket and Reeboks. His jeans have just a few splatters of paint.

“I like finding places that are real chilled out, relaxed and hidden,” says Posada, who works at a deli and waits tables at a restaurant.

He wavers on the question of illegal tagging. In one breath, he says, “It’s kind of childish.” In the next, “It’s real vibrant and impulsive – emotional.”

He settles on: “It’s like a big beast you can’t tame.”

Neil Trugman, a retired D.C. police officer who investigated gangs, teaches other officers about graffiti. A main distinction for the authorities, he says, is between gang graffiti (usually in a single color and used to leave messages) and tagging, often multi-colored nicknames composed of big “bubble” letters.

Most taggers aren’t members of a gang, Trugman says. They’re usually kids just trying to top one another with their artistic style and obscure locations.

“They have a talent that doesn’t need to be put on cement walls, it needs to be put on canvas,” he adds.

Graffiti art, commonly associated with hip-hop music, derives from a tradition of subway art in New York in the 1970s. Many cities have a “hall of fame” or “wall of honor” where graffiti artists do their best work. The District’s “hall of fame” is in a train tunnel in L’Enfant Plaza. Police try to keep taggers out, but on weekend nights you can smell the fresh paint, Trugman says.

Posada’s tag is “Tale,” a shorter version of his nickname, “Nicktale.” Besides being a way to identify themselves to other artists, the short names can be written fast to avoid being caught.

Trugman emphasizes that officers often use counseling to try to deter taggers. But police do make arrests, and those convicted often face community service, probation, fines, jail time or a combination thereof. Posada has been arrested four times but doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong.

He says he started out just “throwing up” his name everywhere. Now, however, he says he does it for the art.

He hopes the gallery show will produce other legal artistic opportunities.

Posada says some of his associates don’t think he should discuss their actions publicly, but he wants people to understand the art.

“I feel I’ve become a better person because of it,” he says.

Posada still paints illegally, too, though he adds, “I might grow out of it.”

Copyright © The Washington Post. All rights reserved.

Govinda Gallery recently celebrated its 34th anniversary on 34th street in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Vanity Fair online featured a story on this milestone for Govinda, Govinda Gallery: A Gem in Georgetown. Govinda’s anniversary was also celebrated by Washington Life magazine in their story Miracle on 34th Street.

More info on the Matthew Niederhauser Exhibit »

Govinda Gallery’s invitation for Annie Leibovitz’s Photographs exhibition.  This was Leibovitz’s first exhibition of her photography.  The review in the Washington Post is written by the newspaper’s esteemed art critic Paul Richard.  Copyright © Govinda Gallery Archives. All rights reserved.

The Washington Post, Tuesday, December 4, 1984

Her Picture Show: Sharp Focus on the Famous

By Paul Richard, Washington Post Staff Writer

Annie Leibovitz’s photographs surprise.

That’s the most surprising thing about them.

The 54 on view at the Govinda Gallery, 1227 34^th St. NW, have the sock-it-to-the viewer unsubtlety of posters.  Who needs another portrait of the Rolling Stones?  Or another of Clint Eastwood, John Belushi, Robert Redford, Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen?

Every face she sells us has already sold.

And yet we buy them without question.

There is, to use an antique word, something hip about these pictures.  Leibovitz, the artist, is hip to what is going on.  So, too, are the famous folks she shoots.  Her photographs make us hip.  We’re all in it together.  The ‘60s are long past.  But some old and warming sense of tribe glows within these portraits, and dissolves the cold commercial gelatin which usually encases American celebrities who pose for magazines.

Here is Robert Redford in the sun at Malibu, posing on the porch of a zillion-dollar beach house.  He’s wearing cowboy boots, pressed jeans and his Foster Grants.  He is dressed not up, but down.  Some duller, lesser artist might have made Redford earnest, might have posed him by a Utah stream, concerned about the trout.  Not Leibovitz.  The Hollywood book on Redford is he’s nothing but a beach boy: throw a stone at Malibu, and you’ll hit five Robert Redfords, they say.  Leibovitz knows that.  So does Redford.  Looking at this portrait, so do we.

Here, too, is Clint Eastwood, bound around with ropes, standing on some dusty street in the Wild Wild West.  He’s wearing his jogging shoes and an alligator shirt.

“I wanted to shoot Eastwood at home,” says Leibovitz.  “but he was having trouble with his wife.  He said he’d pose on the lot at Burbank, and that I could use any prop around.  I got into it.  I made the guys who ran the smoke machine change the color of the dust.  Just as I was shooting, a grip walked by, carrying a rope.  I used it.”

The viewer, Leibovitz and Eastwood, the three of us together, know that the muscular, unkillable Man with No Name is about to burst free.

When Leibovitz, after hanging out at his house, asked Steve Martin how he’d like to be photographed, the comic pointed at his precious abstract by expressionist Franz Kline and said he would like to be seen in that big black-and-white action painting.  Leibovitz obliged, sort of.  She dressed him in a rented (soon to be ruined) set of white tails which she slathered with black paint.

“I think of myself as having a pretty average viewpoint,” says Leibovitz.  “Wrapping Christo or painting the Blues Brothers blue, that’s pretty obvious.”

She is being modest.  Her modesty becomes her.  It is one of her sharpest weapons.  She presents to strangers, and to her subjects, too, a touching vulnerability.  Leibovitz is six feet tall—but at the same time she is “Annie,” like the little orphan, a waif in need of help.  Strangers let their guards down.  They try to help her out.

Sometimes, they betray themselves while doing so—or at least reveal their souls.  Her Johnny Carson is a sort of cipher, her John Irving (wearing his wrestling uniform and sucking in his gut) is a caricature of macho, and her John Belushi is a bloated ruin.  But Leibovitz, unlike Diane Arbus, say, is rarely harsh.  She makes sexy ladies sexy (she portrayed Linda Ronstadt rolling in the sheets and a half-naked Debra Winger necking with her dog); she makes leading men good-looking.  Leibovitz, after all, photographs the stars.

Like other busy portraitists, she has some trademark tricks.  She likes the privacy suggested by the tiled walls of bathrooms.  Or places that look like bathrooms.  She photographed Bruce Springsteen, just after a concert, in his white-tiled shower room, Laurie Anderson at a tiled swimming pool, and Woody Allen in the ladies’ room.  The tiles there are pink.

The bathroom is an intimate place.  Getting naked or even half-naked is an intimate act.  Those who pose for Leibovitz –not only Lennon, but Michael Douglas, Mick Jagger, Sylvester Stallone, Jerzy Kosinski (whose chest, she notes, “is wholly hairless”), Lauren Hutton and even Robert Penn Warren—often take their clothes off.

Sometimes she submerges the people whom she photographs.  She submerged Lauren Hutton up to her eyebrows in mud, Whoopi Goldberg in milk, and Bette “The Rose” Midler in a sea of red long-stemmed roses.

A young Muhammad Ali, dressed in black and scowling, sprawls on the crimson carpet of his Scarlett O’Hara-scarlet stairs.  Rodney Dangerfield hugs a weeping baby.  Leibovitz is fine at dreaming up story-telling portraits.

But she invents less than she reports.

She’s an ace journalist.  She has that killer instinct for exactly the right instant.  Some of the most astonishing pictures she made for Rolling Stone were taken at the White House the day President Nixon, who had just resigned, departed for California.  She was competing head-to-head with an army of news photographers.  She beat her competition cold.  The magazine had commissioned a Nixon-resigns story from Hunter S. Thompson who, not for the first time, blew the assignment.  Leibovitz didn’t.

Copyright © The Washington Post. All rights reserved.

Annie Leibovitz autographing copies of her first book Annie Leibovitz: Photographs at Govinda Gallery, Washington, D.C.,  November 30, 1984.  Polaroid Photo Copyright © Chris Murray. All rights reserved.

— Stephanie Mansfield, The Washington Post

The Washington Post, Tuesday, December 4, 1984:

The Star Shooter

Photographer Annie Leibovitz, Finding a Role for Herself

By Stephanie Mansfield, Washington Post Staff Writer

Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, is nervous.

She wrings her hands and throws back her chestnut hair and says she really doesn’t want her picture taken. Sweat glimmers over her upper lip and her laugh booms self-consciously.

When she’s taking the pictures, she says, she knows how to make people comfortable – Bette Midler on a bed of roses, Woody Allen in a flamingo-pink tiled bathroom, Debra Winger, topless, on top of her German shepherd, Meryl Streep in clown face, stretching her Botticelli features into self-mocking distortion.

“I give them a role to play,” she says, “because everyone’s comfortable if they know what’s expected of them.”

On this day in the Georgetown gallery where her portraits are on view, there’s no role for her to play.

The photographer wants her to relax and be herself, but the woman who has been called the best living portrait photographer in America says that, quite frankly, she’s just beginning to claim her own persona at 35, after years of winning fame by photographing the famous. She smiles into the sunlight. She mugs for the camera.

She is the Matthew Brady of the baby boomers, a woman who has captured the madness of her time with her camera. Her name is synonymous with Rolling Stone magazine (where she worked from 1970 to 1983), rock music, drugs, sex, celebrities and their sycophants who posed often and willingly in whatever fantasy the frenetic photographer cooked up.

“I know I’m going to regret this,” she says. She pulls over oversized khaki shirt over her head.

She is also signing books of her photographs for friends, but instead of autographing them she is pressing her hands and feet onto an ink pad and leaving the impressions on the flyleaves. When she talks, thoughts are strung together like secondhand Christmas tree lights: still bright, but slightly out of sync.

She squints. Looks away. Wails at the top of her lungs when the camera lens zooms in.

For many years, she says, the lens put the distance between her and others. “For so many years I used the machine in front of my face. It was a shield. It was the only thing that made me different from them.”

Taking their pictures was actually easy, she says. If people already had an image, a reputation, she could play on that. She invented roles for them. Moved in with them for weeks at a time, mellowing out with Mick Jagger and hamming it up with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. She was known as a difficult professional, a perfectionist who spent days getting the light right, the costumes right, all the time armed with 35-millimeter camera strung around her neck.

“I didn’t have much of a home life. I guess I spent so much time with them because I didn’t want to go home. Also, the people were my age, it was a kind of peer thing,” she says.

She is wearing black trousers, white Michael Jackson socks, red leather loafers, no makeup and a man’s tweed overcoat she picked up for $40 at a thrift shop. She is six feet tall. Part Annie Hall, part amazon queen, she is strikingly attractive in an androgynous fashion. The look is deliberate, she says. By being neither male or female she is nonthreatening to both sexes and presumably equally as attractive.

“It works. I know. I think I’ve gotten used to that,” she says. “I think that working all those years brought out the male part. You stop thinking of yourself as a woman. I don’t know whether it was planned. I think I was trying, since I was with men writers a lot, I was trying to be one of them.” She pauses. “In my work I sort of like to be nothing. A blank canvas. I don’t want people I work with to feel there’s competition involved. But in a way, I’m beginning to feel it makes even a stronger statement in another direction. I wonder if it’s scary sometimes. I intimidate them into taking the picture.”

Her voice takes on the timbre of a drill sergeant’s: “OKAY STAND OVER THERE.”

She smiles. “At times I used being a woman for the picture.”

It was always more comfortable to shoot men, she says.

“The change came when Linda Ronstadt and I just played. We got some red underwear and played on these pillows. That was an important picture for me because it was a start of being able to enjoy looking [at women]. It’s weird now. I can look at women and really appreciate them. I can look at men and really appreciate them.” She laughs.

She leans against the gallery wall, surveying her work. She takes a deep breath as the camera shutter clicks. The photo session ends and her face flushes with relief. The kind of look most people have walking out of the dentist’s.
“I’m sorry. I really was kind of nervous.” She sits down, pries the plastic lid from a cup of coffee and throws her head back.

She says she has grown up a lot, especially after leaving Rolling Stone last year to join Vanity Fair. “I feel like I’m now in a grown-up world. I felt like Rolling Stone never did want to grow old gracefully. Vanity Fair is showing me how to enjoy yourself in the older years and live well.”

Leibovitz was born in Connecticut and grew up in Silver Spring. Her father was in the Air Force and “I spent most of my youth in the back of a station wagon, driving around with six kids.” She says the family life was documented by photographs. It told her where they had been, and where they were going.

She left Washington to attend the San Francisco Art Institute and landed the job at Rolling Stone before graduating. “I was always interested in art and went to the Art Institute to learn to be a painter. I took a night class in photography. I think I was trying really hard to be freaky, but I wasn’t very good at smoking grass. I would try to blend in where I was, but I never found myself. I wasn’t a very good hippie.”

When she joined Rolling Stone, she says, “I couldn’t keep up with Hunter Thompson very well. I think I was trying for so many years and I almost killed myself in the process. So it’s great now, to sort of…I guess I was pretty conservative. I think I’m doing it right on time now with Reagan.

“I don’t have any desire to be 20 or 21 again. I feel like I’ve had the craziest time of my life and I really feel it’s a great foundation for what’s to come. This sounds extremely corny, but it’s really like I’m just starting. I have a reputation now as a portrait photographer, and I feel set up for the rest of my life. I love it. I have nothing else to do but be grateful. It’s like everything has fallen into place.”

Was there ever a problem with being taken seriously?

Her husky laugh comes easily. “It’s fun, this stuff. I’m hoping that at the end of my lifetime, there will be a body of work. That is what I hope will be taken seriously. I’m sure there are people who will tell you I did my best work for Rolling Stone, and that will be it. But I haven’t stopped.”

Leibovitz has a certain quality, an aura of zaniness, that allows her to travel with ease among the superstars of the ‘70s. Maybe it’s because she was so young herself.

“That’s right. I didn’t know what I was doing before. I went from job to job, and you know how easy it is to just hang in there. I never went home.”

Finally, she realized that her chameleon-like personality and penchant for living vicariously had left her with no sense of self.

“My pictures were becoming cold. I had to find myself. If I had stayed at Rolling Stone, I never would find out what I could do myself. I think I almost used myself up. I came dangerously close to that.”

Now, she has become a sort of family photographer to some of her subjects.

“I just photographed Mariel Hemingway and the man she is marrying. I photographed her during ‘Personal Best’ time, when she was this gangly little girl, and then we did these pictures of her when she became more of a woman, so to speak,” she laughs, referring to Hemingway’s breast implants for her role as Dorothy Stratten in “Star 80.”

“Now, to see her come in with the guy she’s going to marry…”

Hovering so close to fame, was there ever any envy?

“No. I kept away from having attention all those years because maybe I was scared by what I’d seen happen to people. Big heads or whatever. I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m not one of those people. I’m not the people I photograph. It’s more of a service I perform.”

“I’m not making much sense, am I? One thing I learned from John Lennon was that we all really are equal. We deserve to be treated equally. For many years, I don’t know whether I believed in ‘stars,’ but I do think there are great entertainers and people who know how to please. Great entertainers, great athletes, great writers. I have respect for people who produce. It’s amazing how people get motivated to do anything.”

She says that during her years at Rolling Stone, “I had no personal life. My longest relationship has always been my work. My work has always delivered for me. It’s a little backwards now. I’ve been seeing one person for about a year now. I’m taking better care of myself. I’ve built a network of friends.”

It’s the difference, she figures, between the 50-yard dash and the marathon. She echoes the sentiments of many of her contemporaries.

“I really expected to be dead at 30.”

Copyright © The Washington Post. All rights reserved.