Photographer Annie Leibovitz, queen and rebel at the 'Wonderland' exhibition

A CoruñaAmerican photographer Annie Leibovitz (Waterbury, Connecticut, 1949) has photographed kings and queens of all kinds, from the Rolling Stones to Queen Elizabeth II of England, the King and Queen of Spain, and the great stars of film, music, and fashion, including Penélope Cruz. Leibovitz herself arrived like a rock star at the exhibition dedicated to her by the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation (MOP), which runs from this Saturday until May 1, 2026, in its gallery on the Batería dock in the port of A Coruña. Leibovitz is in charge: she moved the dozens of assembled journalists as she pleased and repeatedly asked them to maintain social distancing. She went out of her way to manage the crowd, and in a tense moment with a reporter who wanted to photograph her from below but was prevented from doing so, she sided with the photographer.

The exhibition, titled WonderlandShe focuses on her fashion photography, but Queen Leibovitz is a rebel monarch, and she rejects any label: "I'm not a fashion photographer, but Anna Wintour had the intuition that I could be one, and she wanted me to apply my journalistic experience to the world of fashion. "Fashion has been a great space to play, and over the years I've learned that designers are great artists. In fact, fashion and comedy can help us survive in this politically difficult time," she explains.

Indeed, the outfits seem to matter little, because the hundreds of works on display, including projections and photographs, reveal above all her potential as a portraitist and storyteller. "It's incredible that this portrait of Melania Trump is a fashion photograph; she really likes it," says Leibovitz, referring to an image of the current pregnant First Lady of the United States stepping off a plane in a gold bikini while Donald Trump waits for her inside a Porsche. And regarding a series of images of the Kardashians, she admits that she missed "the social commentary." On the other hand, the portrait of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, due to its rigidity, feels a bit off. Leibovitz says that the King was "relaxed," while the Queen was more "nervous and worried," and that they were surprised she wanted to take such a formal photo, but they respected her decision. "I knew it had to be exhibited at the Bank of Spain, and I'm interested in timelessness, in creating a work that endures," she says.

A "visionary" artist

Because Leibovitz wanted the exhibition to have an educational purpose for young photographers, the installation recreates her studio with walls covered in cork panels. On the large screens that greet visitors, amidst praise from Bruce Springsteen, creative director Grace Coddington, and figures from the fashion world, are two stark images from the Bosnian War, taken when she traveled to Sarajevo accompanying her partner, the writer Susan Sontag. "Leibovitz leaves a legacy for us to learn from ourselves," says Springsteen, while Coddington highlights her "profound honesty" and that she is a "visionary."

The intensity continues in the first part of the exhibition, dedicated to her work as the photographer for the Rolling Stones' 1975 tour. "I threw myself headlong into that tour, and it almost killed me, because I had no idea what I was getting myself into," she explains. “I knew we’d be staying in good hotels, and I brought my rackets to improve my tennis,” he adds, “but, of course, I never saw the light of day. I hadn’t looked at these works again until, for this exhibition, we displayed them like a river of photographs, a kind of obsessive, youthful current. I can look at them with a youthful gaze now, with the fervor, the drive, and the madness you need to do the job well. I never put the camera down; in a way, I used it to save my life.”

Leibovitz's exhibition is the sixth at the MOP Foundation center, and the first by a female photographer. "For a photograph to be good, you shouldn't look at the camera, but rather want to delve into the content," Leibovitz advises. "What's important today is photojournalism, what's happening to these young people who go out to work and lose their lives. Photography is powerful." Leibovitz's career began at the magazine Rolling Stonewhere she worked between 1970 and 1983. "I was in my twenties, working with incredible writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Truman Capote. This required me to be sharp and quite funny, especially with Hunter S. Thompson."

Leibovitz, who points to her camel in one of the photographs, remembers that period as one of car trips between San Francisco and Los Angeles. "You could take Interstate 5 and drive from one city to the other in about three and a half hours. I drove at about 100 miles per hour, and I got tickets." In Rolling Stone, Leibovitz began taking color portraits of musicians like Patti Smith and David Byrne: "I had to think about what they had to do, and I started doing it more conceptually."

Portraits of famous fashion designers

Leibovitz's career continued in the magazine Vanity Fair From 1983 onwards, already Vogue From 1998 onwards. Fashion photography appears in the exhibition with the projection of portraits of some seventy great designers who have posed for it, including Karl Lagerfeld in bed surrounded by a pile of drawings, John Galliano in a bathtub with a decadent air, Nicolas Ghesquière as a draftsman, and Tom Ford Armani in a portrait where she also appears. "When I started, a very famous art director told me I could do whatever I wanted, but the clothes had to be visible. Suddenly, the fashion took precedence over the person," says Leibovitz.

As for her influences, when she was young, she spent hours at newsstands looking at magazines, too expensive for her to afford, where Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Eugene Smith published. "What I started doing was concentrating a story into a single image," Leibovitz recalls, before recounting the story of the legendary photograph she took of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the cover of Rolling Stone Hours before Lennon's murder, although it is not on display. "John liked it a lot; it represented his relationship with Yoko, and then it became a very poignant image."

Very often Leibovitz's fashion editorials are lavish productions, like the one she did inspired by The Wizard of Oz, featuring various established artists such as Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and Karl Walker; another was based on Alice in WonderlandAn empowered Penélope Cruz appears in four photographs, three of them with a distinctly Spanish flair; another of the protagonists is Rihanna, whom Leibovitz photographed nude and pregnant with her first child. "She's so intelligent," she says. "At that time, I thought I'd already done everything in the fashion world." And about Diane Keaton, who appears with her back to the camera in one portrait, she says that she's unlike any other Hollywood star. "She was clearly an artist, also a photographer, and she always came to the shoot with ideas. There was a fashion editor who had prepared many looks, and I told him that she wouldn't wear any of them. And, indeed, she didn't. She had a very clear idea of what she wanted to wear; she wanted to set the tone," she recalls. "Today, most women dress for themselves, they choose what they want to wear, and they take the reins," she observes.

The exhibition doesn't include iconic works like the nude of a pregnant Demi Moore or the portrait of Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk. Even so, the final section features portraits of writers Salman Rushdie and Joan Didion, physicist Stephen Hawking, Barack Obama's mother, Elon Musk—when he was just beginning to develop his aerospace plans—and the African American painter Faith Ringgold. "I've always been interested in the creative process, how things are made. There's nothing more interesting than going into an artist's studio and seeing their work and how they live," says Leibovitz, who is enjoying getting older. "People don't talk about how wonderful it is to get older. As you get older, you start to know what you're doing. This doesn't mean your work is good, but you know what you're doing."