Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. She wasn’t on assignment. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her.
“Pilgrimage” heralds Leibovitz’s return. It is also, it turns out, her first project that is not connected to any assignment, her first shot with only a digital camera, and her first that doesn’t show a living soul. Following her interests and her (dead) heroes, she started at Niagara Falls, worked her way through New England (home of the Transcendentalists); England (home of the Bloomsbury group); the American West (home of the American sublime); and Washington, D.C. (home of the Lincoln memorial). She took pictures of objects she was drawn to—Emily Dickinson’s white dress; Virginia Woolf’s writing desk; Annie Oakley’s tiny heart-shaped target pierced by a bullet hole; Robert Smithson’s spiral jetty; and a cast of the veiny hands of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.” Sarah Boxer (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/annie-leibovitzs-ghosts)