On Friday, photographer Annie Leibovitz unveiled her world in “Wonderland,” her first major exhibition in Spain, promoted by the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation, featuring images of Rihanna- “a super-intelligent woman”- as well as Penélope Cruz, Almodóvar, Elon Musk, and Salman Rushdie.

Born in Connecticut, US in 1949, Leibovitz’s career spans five decades, which are explored in the exhibition. She is the artist behind some of the most emblematic images of pop culture and of her country’s history.

“I’ve been in a position where I’ve been able to photograph an era of my life,” she said, making the exhibition a “historical document of the world we’ve lived through.”

“Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something,” Leibovitz said, emphasising that her true interest lies in portraiture and “understanding” the person, as well as discovering other artists’ creative processes.

However, she stressed that if there is one field she deeply respects, it is photojournalism. “It is the most extraordinary photography,” she said, praising the work of reporters who risk- and sometimes lose- their lives to capture an image.

She noted that in her work, “above all”, she thinks about the timelessness of her photos. “I like them to last,” said Annie Leibovitz during a tour of the exhibition with nearly a hundred journalists through the rooms, where videos featuring Bruce Springsteen, her agent, Karen Mulligan, and creative director Grace Coddington are also shown, detailing her meticulousness, obstinacy, and the determination in her work.

The MOP Foundation’s space at the port of A Coruña will be open to the public from this Saturday, November 22, until May 1, 2026, and will allow visitors to view hundreds of images (many of them exhibited for the first time) by the photographer who made the portraits of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, which hang on the walls of the Bank of Spain.

“They were both surprised that I wanted to take such a formal photo, but I was interested in starting from tradition,” she said.

Although two rooms of the exhibition are dedicated to fashion and Hollywood, the photographer said that when she started out she did not take fashion “very seriously.” “I was more interested in technique than fashion,” she said, and revealed that this is why she spent hours in front of news-stands observing the work of photographers she admired. But “you can’t take a fashion photograph without seeing fashion,” she added.

She confirmed that it was Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who ultimately made her a fashion photographer.

Beyond the image

In addition to a journey through her career, the exhibition offers a mirror of her work, also revealing how she creates it. In some images she introduces, without words, a social commentary in what she called her “journalistic facet.”

This is the case of a photograph of Kim Kardashian with her daughter in her arms, taking a portrait with her mobile phone, while her ex-husband takes another with an iPad, alongside Leibovitz’s own.

The exhibition begins with a mural, which she calls the “learning” one for young photographers, with images from the Rolling Stones’ 1975 tour, which she joined when she was still a student, claiming she knew how to use colour- “but it wasn’t true.”

After starting at Rolling Stone magazine, she moved on to Vanity Fair, where she engaged with social realities, a period that led to Vogue, with fashion and Hollywood at her feet.

Iconic images

The artist who took the last image of John Lennon before he was murdered created iconic images such as the 1991 portrait of actress Demi Moore, nude and pregnant, a controversial Vanity Fair cover later emulated by singers such as Rihanna. She also took lesser-known portraits such as those of Tom Cruise and a young Scarlett Johansson.

Pinned with drawing pins, the photographs show the evolution of the photographer, with images of athletes and activists for the environment and human rights, her parents driving, and even her “dealer.”

Winner of the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, the Leibovitz show underscores her interest in writers, visual artists, and landscape.

Meticulousness

“When I did a reportage on different poets for Life magazine, I read all their work; I wondered whether it could be represented in photography,” she said of her meticulousness.

A detail that is evident in her books “Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz”, stories she translated into images while reading those tales to her daughters, in which she involved designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford.

She admitted that she was not sure she wanted to do this exhibition, but her visit to the Irving Penn exhibition, together with Marta Ortega and Carlos Torretta, erased her doubts.

“Tears came to my eyes, and here we are,” she said, a supporter of taking art to all places, “big or small cities.”

At 76, she said with a smile that “we don’t talk about how wonderful it is to get older. You relax more, you know what you’re doing, although you still don’t know if it’s right or wrong.”