This week Corcoran Group Real Estate launched an evolution of its "Live Who You Are" campaign, with ads featuring 12 portraits of notable cultural figures—from Jimmy Buffet to professional surfer Quincy Davis, as well as restaurateurs, equestrians, and artisans. The message embedded in these images is that the homes we purchase should reflect the most creative, stylish, or ambitious parts of ourselves. And who better to document this heightened sense of self than celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz?
Sure, these are, in a sense, commercial images. But into this ad campaign Leibovitz injects her familiar hyperreality. In Christina Tosi’s Brooklyn home, we find the chef and owner of Milk Bar at work in her kitchen. She sits casually (cross-legged, barefoot), one dog under the table and another on top, perched among a mixing bowl and dishes spilling over with baking ingredients. This is a simulated, exploded realism; Tosi probably doesn’t let her dog play on the table while she’s baking, and the ensuing chaos probably isn’t always so cheerful. But through Leibovitz’s careful staging, we instantly know this small kitchen is the fulcrum of Tosi’s personal life and the center of her home, filled with the things and creatures she loves.
Likewise, while artist Michele Oka Doner seems an impossibly elegant, living sculpture (she’s frequently photographed draped in black or cream, as if carved from marble), we understand that Oka Doner doesn’t spend her afternoons posing in her SoHo studio as a piece of art herself. Leibovitz thus presents settings that are at once aspirational and totally achievable; these are the homes and lives we wish to inhabit—and we can.
