Annie Leibovitz is most renowned for her legendary celebrity portraits, thanks to which she gained worldwide popularity and is now considered one of the most influential photographers of our time.
Leibovitz’s photograph of Keith Haring is one of the artist's most popular portraits that made her auction record in 2016. The shot is proof of one of the photographer's central themes: subtle but artistically rendered nudity. The artwork represents the historic original snapshot from 1986.
“Keith and I talked on the phone and I asked him if he had ever painted himself,” Leibovitz explains in her book Annie Leibovitz At Work. “He said no, but we decided that he would paint his torso for me. We shot it in the studio, on a set constructed to look like someone’s living room, then painted it white. When Keith arrived he painted the room with black lines in less than 45 minutes. Then he painted his upper body in about five minutes. When he came out of the dressing room he was wearing white painters’ pants, but it just seemed obvious to both of us at that point that he should paint the rest of him.”
“ Years before it ever occurred to me that one could have a life as a photographer, I had become accustomed to looking at the world through a frame. „