Annie Leibovitz didn’t want to reveal much at the press conference to launch her ten-city tour of new photographs. She feels, she says, “very protective” ahead of the January 2016 opening of the second phase of a project she began in 1999 with Susan Sontag. So while the full list of sitters for between 20 and 30 portraits was not revealed, they will include the tennis sisters Serena and Venus Williams, the actor and comedian Amy Schumer, also snapped with her sister, as well as a portrait of Leibovitz with her three daughters taken through a slightly distorting mirror.
“Family photos are very important to me, not least as a single mum with three young kids,” she says. So has becoming a parent changed her attitude to the women that she is snapping this time around? Not as much as she expected, “though I am more empathetic with families travelling with kids on a plane these days”, she says.
Women: New Portraits starts in Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in London on 16 January 2016, after which it travels to Tokyo, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Istanbul, Frankfurt, New York and Zurich. The series and tour are funded by UBS bank and the photographs will form part of its corporate collection.