She worked at a photo lab that was dying a slow, pixelated death. Her days were spent color-correcting other people’s wedding photos and passport pictures. At night, she scrolled through the work of the gods: Cartier-Bresson, Avedon, and above all, Annie Leibovitz. Elara knew every frame of Photographs 1970-1990 . She could describe the lighting in that iconic shot of a naked, pregnant Demi Moore, and the raw vulnerability of John Lennon curling around Yoko Ono, taken just hours before his death.
The next morning, she did something she had never done before. She went to the pawn shop. With the last of her savings, she didn’t buy a new DSLR or a fancy lens. She bought a broken, beat-up Polaroid SX-70 from 1977—the kind Annie used in her early Rolling Stone days. It had a cracked casing and only two packs of expired film.
Annie Leibovitz Teaches Photography. The art of storytelling through the lens.