Than you very much for such a wonderful post. You are kind sharing your information with us all….

Of course they look “freaking spectacular” they are digital photos retouched with Photoshop !

Just look at the photo of the queen with the cloudy background.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/19/sm_thequeen119.xml

The Queen looks modern yet there is a stillness the projects the inner strength and power of a most extraordinary lady. My guess is that in the years to come, in history, it will be the defining image of Her Majesty in her later years and not the potrait that Annie took as super as it was.

It was interesting to see this video with HM and AL – I had seen the rest of that series but not that episode. The work in the actual photoshoot, their interaction, was interesting though too brief. Would have made a great special in of itself showing more background and what went into the shoot though I know this was not the intention of this series which was after all about the royals. Lots of good comments here too on the blog. As I read each one, I thought of commenting on it, then the next and next…

@35: I will say that having HM on a horse with Windsor Castle in the background would be a striking image. But in the Royal apartments? Great for VF, but for the reasons Robert outlined, it would never be approved.

@33: she is a business. A brand. not sure if you meant it as a compliment or not, but on some level if you are a photographer and don’t treat yourself as a business *and* as a photographer you are going to fail.

She isn’t my fav photographer, but watching this video you can certainly learn from her. And the HM shots as displayed in the video and as I found online were incredible.

And if you need a few assistants to pull that off? So be it.

Liebovitz’s show at the SF Legion of Honor just opened and this is getting me extra excited about going to see it!

You can’t you really think that….? Imagine you are a king, and aged about 80 or so you release a picture of yourself sitting on your horse in your enormous palace. Would you think that was regal ? Would you think that was the image you wished to project ? Of a mad old king, living in an enormous palace whilst your subjects struggled with their mortgages ? Possibly that would be a good portrait for VF or something similar – something that a picture editor might want to scoop – but for a commissioned portrait from a monarch you have got to be kidding…..

I am very pleased that someone else pointed out the crown/tiara and Ceecil/Cecil thing. My innner pedant over that was railing about it. I also must say that I thought HM’s reaction to being told the “crown” was too dressy was quite amusing, all kitted out in her full regalia as she was.

As an aside, I once asked the girls at the lab that did the queen’s photos what the pictures were like, and they both burst into giggles and said it was all corgis. Corgis, corgis corgis. God bless you ma’am !

Re Annie Liebowitz: There was a great article online somewhere about when AL was interviewed by The Times (London) and they sent Elliot Erwitt round to her studio to photograph her and her assistants wouldn’t let him in because they said she was busy. When she found out who had been turned away she was rather embarrassed. I must say I don’t knwo her work well enough to comment, though I did think the Queen photos were not bad at all, though when I saw one of the Disney one’s in the paper the other week, I almost lost my breakfast. I am sure Disney are very pleased with them, mind you.

RP

The Queen on a horse would make a fine picture and it never hurts to ask.

there’s a whole lot of “business” and business that goes into her making an image…and if that’s what works for her sobeit

and as for the final prints/portraits that were sent to her/Queenie after the shoot, they looked freaking spectacular

1. It was a tiara, not a crown. The actual crown is worn only at state occasions like the opening of parliament. The tiara is “her own”, so to speak..

2. Being over 80 years old, the queen hasn’t been upon a horse in about 20 years- the idea of her upon one- in the state rooms! -is ludicrous. It might make for a surreal picture, but it would also make her look like a fool. Rightly rejected.

3. It wasn’t rude not to curtsy. Only British subjects are obliged to do so, and there has long been a standard diplomatic etiquette that some Americans- such as First Ladies- do not curtsy to royalty. Otherwise it’s optional, if fusty and unnecessary.

4. The pictures really did come out beautifully- full marks for them. Perhaps some might find the digital addition of storm clouds heavy-handed, but did add to the pictorial atmosphere.
Seeking meaning in said clouds though is probably a meaningless exercise. Impending death, doom, the fall of the monarchy? Who the hell knows.

My problem with Liebovitz, and just my humble opinion: She does the opposite of portraitists who attempt insight, real or not, into the personality of the sitter, a “behind the mask” glimpse. She is ALL about the mask. She tends in my view to flatten celebrities into easily recognizable caricatures of themselves, representations of exactly who they’d like you to think of themselves as. Thus, Schwarzenegger is a muscular hero on a white horse, Ella Fitzgerald is a red-hot mama with a snazzy Cadillac, on an on and on.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this. Cecil Beaton (who she gratingly pronounces “see-sil”) did this superbly well, but with rather more flair and imagination than Liebovitz. I just find her outsize reputation as a “great” photographer hugely overstated- walking through an exhibit of hers a few years ago, sponsored by American Express, I left the gallery feeling like i’d just consumed empty calories, advertising, sugared gloss.

She has a peculiar way of depicting African-Americans in her corpus; whether dousing Whoopi in a bathtub of milk, or having a bunch of jive-ass stereotypes of black men worshipping the golden beauty of Kate Hudson, or the current VF where the only black woman looks like a stripper where all the white actresses look like debutantes.

Her non-celebrity work is dull and banal, when it’s not exploitative. Susan Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, is absolutely furious with her for photographing his mother’s agony and death.

Sorry for going on. She’s done some great pictures, but largely I find her vapid and overrated, better suited to the Advertising Hall of Fame than a hypothetical Photography one.

Last fall I was asked to photograph Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She has a reputation for disliking photo shoots. She didn’t disappoint. After the third exposure, someone in the back of the room says “Those look Beautiful!” She replied “Great. We’re done then!” She was completely serious and walked off the set. There was nothing anyone could do.

Relating back to the AL shoot… a great example of both a tenacious photographer AND tenacious subject. The cool thing about this shoot is that both parties understood the importance of the task at hand and got the job done.

BBC ended up with some egg on their faces and had to admit that they had manipulated it to make it more sensational.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7060313.stm

If anyone is interested a couple days ago I posted a video of Jill Greenberg on my blog. It gives a little insight into her thought process of her “End Times” project. It’s a good watch if you haven’t seen it before.

Jill Greenberg Shooting Bears

Thanks for sharing the video.

those photoshoots are run pretty much like a filmset.

and if you have ever been to a filmset or worked on one, you realise that there are only a few people working all the time. the others that are around might be sitting there for ages doing close to nothing, but are specialists for one or the other. someone up the hirarchy calls them, they jump into action and might be gone to hybernation in a minute. but what they did do in that one minute would have taken everyone else much longer.
also eleven assisstants means that 11x 30kg of equipment can be moved in one go.

so, shooting the queen, what would you prefer as the boss on set? needing to talk her majesty and all the security and puplic relations people into a 10 minute cigarette break because your assisstant needs to move some stuff or rather go on, and prepare your next psychological move while things are taken care of?

11 assistants.

Great photographer.

Which two don’t belong?

11 assistants: it’s called Vertical Scheduling in corporate circles. Basically it means that AL didn’t have to think about anything but the Queen and when she said Jump, it was done in seconds not minutes. Speed, efficiency and the all important show of the pony.

I guess everybody would have brought lots of assitents and equipment but what actually struck me was that she brought her daughter too. Prob was great for the girl but I would assume that there was some idea going on that it could also help her to connect better with the queen.

For the communication/interaction during the shot: Is this really a good example? Its admittedly difficult to judge from a short sequence but what I see are two people and two worlds rather not connecting: The world of the queen for whom the crown is not a dress but a symbol with deep meaning and the world of fashion and style of Leibovitz when she uses words like “hair and make up” and “dressy” to trick the queen into removing the crown.

I guess you can give her credit for trying but did she really put herself into the head of the queen and think what the crown means to her?

Good reaction from the queen though. In articles it was always mentioned that she snaps back but I found that she laughs it of too. Might have been the communication skills of the queen which saved the day.