American Express sponsors first wide-ranging Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
 

A new exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery tomorrow, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, will draw together for the first time the well-known assignments and rarely-seen personal work of one of the world's best-known portrait photographers.

The exhibition, organised by the Brooklyn Museum, is being sponsored by American Express, with support from London sponsors Bridgepoint and Gap. With over 150 photographs, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, shows iconic images of famous public figures together with personal photographs of her family and close friends. Arranged chronologically, they project a unified narrative of the artist's private life against the backdrop of her public image. 'I don't have two lives,' Leibovitz says. 'This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.' At the heart of the exhibition, Leibovitz's personal photography documents scenes from her life, including the birth and childhood of her three daughters, and vacations, reunions and rites of passage with her parents, her extended family and close friends. Reportage The exhibition features Leibovitz's portraits of well-known figures, including actors such as Jamie Foxx, Daniel Day Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicole Kidman and Brad Pitt, as well as artists and architects such as Richard Avedon, Brice Marden, Philip Johnson, Chuck Close and Cindy Sherman. Highlights include dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer holding a dance position on a beach, William S Burroughs in Kansas and Agnes Martin in Taos. Featured assignment work includes reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and the election of Hillary Clinton to the US Senate. There are also landscapes taken in Monument Valley in the American West and in Wadi Rum in the Jordanian desert. Celebrity endorsement and association has long been a     major component of American Express's marketing campaigns. The company has been running a TV advertising campaign in the US recently spotlighting high profile personalities, including the late Muppets creator, Jim Henson, actor Robert De Niro, comedian John Cleese, director/producer Wes Anderson, surfer Laird Hamilton, comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and writer/producer/director Martin Scorsese. Also featured were tennis greats Venus Williams and Billie Jean King, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg and the late entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr.