Lennon and Leibovitz

It’s been 28 years since John Lennon was murdered. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who visits Atlanta this Wednesday, Dec. 10, was present with her camera only hours before.

Today marks the 28th anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination by Mark David Chapman. The event’s been chronicled and dramatized in books, films and other media, but perhaps the most intriguing and heart-wrenching tribute is Annie Leibovitz’s photo taken hours before Lennon’s death. The image ran as Rolling Stone’s cover shortly after, with no text save the magazine’s logo. Twenty-five years later, the American Society of Magazine Editors named the image the No. 1 magazine cover of the last 40 years.

In Leibovitz’s new book, Annie Leibovitz: At Work, the photographer offers a detailed account of the story behind the photo, her moments with the couple just before Lennon’s murder, as well as the aftermath, including a devastated Yoko Ono laying in a dark room reacting to the image.

From the book:

I photographed them at their apartment in the Dakota early in December, and then a few days later I came back with something specific in mind. ... I thought about how people curl up together in bed, and I asked them to pose nude in an embrace. ... I made a Polaroid of them lying together and John looked at it and said, “You’ve captured our relationship exactly. ... The picture looks like a last kiss now.

Leibovitz’s experiences capturing such singular moments fill At Work, an endeavor intended as “a textbook for a young photographer,” she said when I interviewed her last month. But the book transcends any sort of Photo 101 primer to offer a backstage pass to some of contemporary culture’s most mythic events and personalities: “I had this idea about a pamphlet and I was going to pick 10 photographs and try to talk about them in a way from beginning to end, everything about them — the making of them. ... it was gonna be just this small little book ... and I started talking about the pictures and I realized “God there’s so much more to say about them” than I had thought, and we went from 40 pages to 240 pages.

Leibovitz appears in Atlanta this Wednesday, Dec. 10 at the MJCCA’s Zaban Park location. Check back tomorrow for my Q&A with Leibovitz.

(Photo by Annie Leibovitz/Courtesy www.magazine.org)