Hasta La Ideas

“My background as a photographer is as an observer. I’m a terrible director. The performers I have the most rapport with are comedians, who make up a very special group. They’re sort of like manic depressives. I sympathize with them. They are usually also very intelligent. For me, the classic photograph of a comedian is Charlie Chaplin just leaning. That is such an extraordinarily funny picture. It’s as perfect a photograph as you could ever have of a comedian. Chaplin came from silent films. The challenge for a photographer is to create a visually funny picture without it being stupid. It’s difficult to take a funny picture.”

–Annie Leibovitz, whose images—from the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974 to the formal color portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007—are collected in a new SUMO-sized, limited-edition book from Taschen

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