'Homes are a mirror of ourselves': Annie Leibovitz joins Ikea as inaugural artist in residence: As part of Ikea's Artist in Residence program, Annie Leibovitz will spend 2023 traveling the world to capture how people live in their homes .
During Milan Design Week 2023, Ikea announced Annie Leibovitz as the first creative to participate in the Swedish company's new Artist in Residence program.
According to Ikea's 2022 Life at Home report, nearly half of us don't feel like our home lives are accurately reflected in the media. And of the 37,000 respondents, 61% say their household budgets will be affected by the cost of living crisis.
"We've been in this industry for 80 years, so maybe we need someone else to see what life at home might be like in the future," said Marcus Engman, creative director at the Ingka group (which controls most Ikea stores). Enter the legendary American photographer as the company's first artist-in-residence.
Leibovitz will travel to the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, Germany, Italy, India and Sweden – seven of the 37 countries that participated in the Life at Home survey – capturing normal people doing normal things in normal homes. Leibovitz couldn't be more excited: 'I have incredible respect for Ikea; one of my houses in California has nothing but Ikea furniture,' Leibovitz said at a press conference during the Salone del Mobile, where she has just returned from photographing three Italian subjects for the project. 'Ikea is like a world unto itself, and it doesn't consider how ahead of the game and important it is.'
Can we expect images of overflowing bins, empty fridges and tattered upholstery? Probably not. Leibovitz is not known for gritty photorealism: her photographs have graced the covers of magazines from Vogue to Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone; they are big-budget portraits of A-list stars artfully executed with Hollywood levels of production. But, she explains, 'I learned very early on in my portrait work that you have to start with your subject at home because they are going to sit in a chair a certain way. You will see who they are at home. On some level, our homes are mirrors to ourselves.'
But there's a big difference between capturing everyday people in the kitchen and celebrities. She responds: “For a long time, I really fought against the whole idea that there was a difference. After all, a well-known person is still a person. But actually, with someone famous, the biggest difference is that there are already a lot of photos of that person out there; for example, when I photographed the late Queen of England (in 2007), she was probably the most photographed person in the world.'
What makes this assignment different? “Home is now more important than ever,” she says. "Especially since Covid and the hybrid work-from-home model." But why do people feel that they are not represented in the media, that they are left out? “In the same way that there is a typical idea in the fashion industry about what size a woman should be, there is also a typical idea of what a house is,” says Leibovitz. 'But now we've opened up in all sorts of ways, and there's a difference between a home and feeling at home. And the latter can happen in many different places and perhaps that is more important now than an actual house.'
With 50 years of experience behind her, capturing these social and psychological changes in her subjects doesn't faze her. 'More challenging is how to reduce the images in the series.' Some may be collages in the style Hockney; some may not be one, but two images. Some may appear in a book. Exactly how, when and where they will be shown is absolute secret. And everything will be revealed at the end of the year.