How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz?

[Turtle]

Paul T,

Quite. It might sound cruel, but when you have so much at your fingertips it generally takes an exceptionally large ego and large doses of foolishness to get into a mess like that one. Assuming she is not daft and she has people who would genuinely help her, one struggles not to surmise that ego triumphed over income.

 

[johannielscom]

Good read.

I hereby solemnly swear I will never postpone signing fine art printings, gallery meetings, scheduled phone calls, and that I will not shovel all the money I am going to earn into restoring old buildings.😀

 

[user237428934]

She is an artist. If she was good in dealing with money she probably would work as an accountant.

 

[kshapero]

Sounds to me she is like the federal government and Michael Jackson, just spend whatever you want, borrow for what more you need or want, and keep going. They all crash eventually.

What gets me mad is the government is taking me down with them.

Oh no, here I go again.....you got that right bro. Mellow, breathe thru the nose, calm. 🙂😀

 

[Todd.Hanz]

"How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz? "

Easy, she spent more than she took in.

Todd

 

[lic4]

Where there is blood on the internet, sharks gather.

 

[Disaster_Area]

She is an artist. If she was good in dealing with money she probably would work as an accountant.

True... but if you have that kind of money... and hire financial managers, the only thing you have to do is listen to them. It seems like almost everyone close to her tried to curb her spending to no avail.

If my toilet breaks... I hire a plumber because I know crap about crappers. If the plumber says "Don't use in it while I'm working on it"... and I don't listen to him...whose fault is it when the sh*t hits the fan?

 

[hlpgtf]

You see it all the time at every income level - I know lots of people who can't retire (despite being part of one of the most generous pension systems in the country) even though they can't stand working anymore. They are also the same people who can't comprehend how my wife and I can survive with her at home with our daughter. It just amazes me what we can do with mid-five figures, and how others can blow through millions with so little good to show from it...

 

[jke]

Sounds like she has a money issue (understatement,) and that her family has been aware of it for a while and trying to get her to change her ways has been unsuccessful. So this episode may in the end be productive if it changes her relationship with money to a more rational one. But at the base of all of this is a very familiar story - while trying to string some things together to make it over a financial hump she got caught out by the death of the real estate market. Happened to a lot of people in New York, so much so that there is now a new term - ghost apartments - for properties that are neither for sale nor occupied. Of course, the details to her story suggest that a lack of control may have built that financial hump in the first place.

Fortunate I guess that she wasn't invested with Bernie Madoff. At least she wasn't that stupid, which is more than can be said for quite a few people who were supposed to be otherwise brilliant.

 

[Disaster_Area]

I think the true test of her work will come after this when she may be forced to work on vastly smaller budgets. Don't get me wrong... I love her early Rolling Stones work. But given Kirsten Dunst in France with a basically unlimited budget, an army of fashion designers, stylists, set designers, make up artists and whatever camera's and lighting you could possibly ask for and almost anyone here could probably get a couple good shots out of the thousands and thousands of images she reportedly takes.

 

[Disaster_Area]

well... if things keep going how they're going she WON'T have anything to show for it... Arts Capital could permanently own all her past copy writes and all future ones for up to 10 years.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

What a mess! Obviously, yes, it's all her own fault, but I really feel for her. She's an interesting personality, obsessive and intense, and people like that are often not very good with money.

I just recently read the "At Work" book and liked it a lot. I think she's a terrific portraitist, though she isn't the kind of photographer I turn to for inspiration. She deserved her success, in my view, and perhaps deserves her troubles, as well, though I hope she gets it together and enjoys a second wind.

When she went off and did some of that war correspondent stuff in the nineties, I thought she was pretty good at it. She could easily sell her multiple homes, get out of debt, and reinvent herself. She's smart enough, certainly, and possibly talented enough--her career could have a very interesting third act.

 

[Tuolumne]

Read any book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

/T

 

[Tuolumne]

Sad story.
However how does she rake $24 million in debt in, did she represent the government?
Last year I saw her work and exhibition of her work here in San Francisco. And was disappointed. Frankly the famous shots she took of Bill Gates and Jack Nicholson were taken while they got plain bored during the shoot and she happened to take a snapshot of that moment...

From the article: Leibovitz once described her portraiture method as “get ’em somewhere where they’re bored ****less and there’s nothing to do except take pictures.”

LoL

/T

 

[freeranger]

If my toilet breaks... I hire a plumber because I know crap about crappers. If the plumber says "Don't use in it while I'm working on it"... and I don't listen to him...whose fault is it when the sh*t hits the fan?

Obviously the fault is with the original plumber who, for some crazy reason, installed the U bend directly over a fan. Almost anyone in the plumbing business should know not to do that.

 

[user237428934]

would this get any mention here if it were anne geddes, william wegman, or thomas kinkade ---

Didn't know thomas kinkade. I saw he does extremely oversaturated HDR Photos 😀

 

[Al Kaplan]

I'm going to play the devil's advocate here and say that Annie was the right girl in the right place at the right time and managed to know the right people. She was female and "Womens' Lib" was the buzz word of the era. The fact that she was gay, or maybe bi, made her less threatening and more intriguing, as did her pleasant but not glamorous looks. She was a generation behind Bunny Yeager, and New York was a better place to make money and hob nob with the right people than Miami. To editors, publishers and art directors she was very much a marketable commodity, and she was marketed. She made money but she sold magazines and clothes, capitalism at its finest.

She employed sylists and lighting people and didn't really do much of her own lab work. Hair, make-up, wardrobe, lighting, all done by others, but Annie took all the the credit. She was a good manager and conner of people if not finances. Left on her own I don't think that she'd have succeeded as a photographer.

http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com

 

[Toby]

I think the true test of her work will come after this when she may be forced to work on vastly smaller budgets. Don't get me wrong... I love her early Rolling Stones work. But given Kirsten Dunst in France with a basically unlimited budget, an army of fashion designers, stylists, set designers, make up artists and whatever camera's and lighting you could possibly ask for and almost anyone here could probably get a couple good shots out of the thousands and thousands of images she reportedly takes.

To be honest I far prefer Annie's simple work to the overblown stuff, so a cut in budget may be the a good thing for her artistically if not personally.

 

[peter_n]

She employed sylists and lighting people and didn't really do much of her own lab work. Hair, make-up, wardrobe, lighting, all done by others, but Annie took all the the credit. She was a good manager and conner of people if not finances. Left on her own I don't think that she'd have succeeded as a photographer.

I think that's a fair assessment. What you don't read in the article is that many assistants were extremely unhappy about never receiving credit, but you certainly read about the two who would "go to the mat" for her. She does take all the credit.

 

[Al Kaplan]

There are plenty of people in many fields who've been big enough to state in an interview "And I'd like to thank all of the wonderfull talented people who work with me. I couldn't have done it without them."

And I wasn't referring to film loaders or lunch fetchers. How about make-up and hair stylists, wardrobe people, lighting techs, printers. I thought I'd mentioned those.