'They are the colours of New Mexico' ... O'Keeffe's hand-made pastelsAs I walked into Georgia O'Keeffe's studio, I started to cry. Something just hit me about the way she lived'
Interview by Sarah Phillips guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 22 November 2011 21.30 GMT
I was having a tough time and needed to clear my mind and fill myself up again with what I care about. I have learned over the years how to look after myself and my work, and know that at a certain point it's good to go off and find a different road. It is a matter of stopping and refuelling, filling yourself up again before you lose all feeling. Bringing yourself back.
Pilgrimage, the title of my new collection of photographs, is a very strong word. To me, it means a search, going on a trip looking for something. The idea was more of a meditation, actually. I was inspired by walking into the house of Emily Dickinson's brother, now preserved as a museum in Massachusetts, and noticing that it hadn't changed since Victorian times. The wallpaper was rotting on the walls. I stopped dead in my tracks and started to take snapshots on a digital camera.
I didn't look at that work until a few months later, along with pictures I had taken on a family visit to Niagara Falls. My children had been standing there mesmerised, and I wondered what they were looking at, so I stood behind them and took a picture. I started to accumulate these photographs – shots that had no agenda other than me having been moved to take a picture when I felt like taking one. Then I made myself a list of places I wanted to go to. I'd had a similar idea with Susan Sontag, tentatively called The Beauty Book, which was all about giving us the chance to travel to places we'd always wanted to go to, again taking pictures without any kind of agenda.
I had a list of about 10 just off the top of my head. Then I seemed to bump into other subjects. I had always wanted to go to the Isle of Wight because I never understood how Julia Margaret Cameron could take pictures there that gave no sense she was on an island. Her garden studio isn't there any more, but her garden wall is – and Tennyson's gate, too. So it was like a treasure hunt.
Everything had a domino effect. I went to Concord, Massachusetts, to photograph Walden Pond, which led me to the house of the 19th-century poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. When I was driving back and forth to Emerson's house and the Concord museum, I would pass Orchard House, home to Louisa May Alcott, writer of Little Women. I kept saying to myself: "I'm not going in there, I don't need to do Louisa May Alcott." Then finally one day I stopped and went in, and of course was smitten and started to do some work there.
If you had to find a heart in the book, it would probably be the Georgia O'Keeffe visits. I think I was always sidestepping O'Keeffe. She is such a big, looming figure as an artist and subject, but never really a person I admired or emulated. I was being given an award at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they kindly offered to take me to Ghost Ranch and to her house in Abiquiú, up on a hill overlooking the valley. So I went, and as I walked into her studio I started to cry. Something just hit me about the way she lived. Her frugality – all of her linens were frayed – is a reminder that we don't need much. She had a simple life: she worked every day, grew a vegetable garden and ate well, walking on this land that she was so drawn to. She was the real thing.
'It looks like a mountain, but it’s only 12ft high' ... the ‘anthill’ immortalised in O’Keeffe’s work. Photograph: Annie Leibovitz/Contact I was lucky. The museum's curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes, showed me around. She had written a book about where O'Keeffe painted. There's a red hill in some of the paintings that looks like a mountain; in reality, it is only about 12ft high, almost an anthill. What's remarkable about the house is that it's pretty much been left the way she had it when she was alive. The pastels that O'Keeffe made herself are in the museum. Seeing them, you really have the sense that she held and used them. They are the colours of New Mexico: the reds are the sand in the hill, the blues are the sky.
O'Keeffe was shrewd and very much in control. There is a state-of-the-art phonograph and stereo equipment, with a sign on it saying: "Do not touch volume." I thought one of the curators had done that, but apparently it was O'Keeffe. She walked every day. I remember seeing pictures of her out. She was always bent over, but I didn't know what she was doing. Of course, as soon as I got there and saw all of these rocks around her house, I realised. She brought buckets of them back home. On her walks, she killed rattlesnakes and would scare her visitors by pulling out a box of their rattles. One snake was even encased in a glass-topped table next to her couch.
'She would scare visitors with their rattles' ... a rattlesnake skeleton encased in O’Keeffe’s coffee table Photograph: Annie Leibovitz/Contact I spent over two years on this project. I don't think it is so different from my other work: it's note-taking that builds up a portrait. Photography has so many different aspects and ways to be used. This was about looking for an emotional place where your heart and your soul come together. There was a lot to be inspired by.
• Pilgrimage by Annie Leibovitz is published by Jonathan Cape, price £35. The work will be shown at Hamiltons Gallery, London W1, from 8 December to 20 January.
