The book that inspired photographer Annie Leibovitz's career

Annie Leibovitz at an event in 2015. (Image: Franz Johann Morgenbesser via Wikimedia Commons 2.0; cropped)

Henri Cartier Bresson’s evocative photographs are known around the world. One of his books also inspired a famous modern exponent of photography, Annie Leibovitz, to pick up a camera.

“I became a photographer because of The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson, which was published when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. I was studying painting. Maybe it was something about the word “world,” as well as the pictures, that seduced me,” Leibovitz told The New York Times.

Leibovitz said the realisation that a photographer could travel with a camera to different places and see how other people lived – “make looking a mission” – was a thrilling idea for her.

“The pictures in The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson have been etched in my mind for over 50 years,” Leibovitz said. “The book was the beginning of a long relationship with other photographers’ books—looking at them and then collecting them and creating a working library.”

An itinerant childhood way before the internet era, and before televisions became common, meant that reading was a constant companion of Leibovitz’s.

“We moved frequently because my father was in the Air Force and he was transferred from base to base every couple of years,” she said. “Once a week, my mother would take us to the base library or the public library in whatever town we were living in and my brothers and sisters and I would sit on the floor and read.”

Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales and Nancy Drew were among the books she read in her early years.

In addition, Leibovitz said, “I read my brother Howard’s copies of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Lord of the Rings. Somewhere along the way my mother had bought an old bookcase that came filled with books, including the 28 leather-bound volumes of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Years later I learned it was written by the most knowledgeable and opinionated and literary scholars of the time.”