Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens (2007)
PBS

Description

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens traces the arc of Annie's photographic life, her aspirations to artistry and the trajectory of her career. The film depicts the various phases that shaped her life including childhood, the tumultuous sixties, her transition from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair magazine and later her most significant personal relationships including motherhood. The documentary's highlights center on interviews with her most famous subjects, mentors and colleagues, along with personal insight from Leibovitz herself, to reveal the evolution of inarguably one of today's most influential visual artists.

Tags

Photography

Collected reviews and ratings

7.0 Wall Street Journal | Dorothy Rabinowitz

The most engaging aspects of this film by the photographer's sister, Barbara Leibovitz, are, needless to say, those that deliver the subject herself, holding forth at length about her life and work, which she does with affecting eloquence.
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7.0 Variety | Phil Gallo

An insightful look into how an artist ultimately confronts life and loss through a lens, Barbara Leibovitz's smart docu on her sister Annie follows her evolution from bubbly art school student to denizen of American photography's upper echelon.
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6.0 New York Times | Ginia Bellafante

Ms. Leibovitz has a great deal of fun with her camera but never biting, seditious fun. Her pictures do not denigrate or disparage. Instead they document the celebrity circus with an acutely literal vision, submitting the famous to playfully acrobatic postures and various acts of clownishness.
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6.0 DVD File | Jim Howard, Jr

This documentary is very satisfying because of her talent and achievements, her contribution to pop culture, and her passion for the art of photography. Anyone who has an inkling of interest in photography genuinely owes it to himself or herself to check out this film.
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5.0 DVD Talk | Preston Jones

Perhaps Leibovitz is too well-practiced at procuring rather than sharing intimacies, but Life Through a Lens is the poorer for it. As is, the film is little more than a very handsomely mounted hagiography of one of America's foremost photographers, a shiny, ultimately empty, document of a woman and her work.
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