In A Coruña, a new exhibition celebrates the ‘grandeur and beauty’ of Annie Leibovitz’s photography

The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain, has fast become a destination for those interested in the art of fashion photography: since its opening in 2022, it has hosted comprehensive, career-spanning retrospectives of the greats of the medium, from Helmut Newton and Irving Penn to David Bailey and Steven Meisel.

If its location – the somewhat sleepy coastal city on Spain’s lesser-visited Galician coastline – is curious, the foundation’s namesake gives a clue as to why. Ortega Pérez is the non-executive chair of Inditex, the parent company of Zara, which is based in the nearby Arteixo, the hometown of Ortega Pérez’s father and Inditex founder Amancio Ortega. ‘[It is] focused on holding world-class exhibitions [on] three pillars: A Coruña, photography and fashion,’ she has previously said of the foundation’s mission, aiming to both give back to the local community and draw in new visitors to the region.

Its latest exhibition, which opens this week, seeks to bolster the foundation’s status, focusing on the work of American photographer Annie Leibovitz (as such, she will be the first woman to be the subject of one of the MOP Foundation’s banner exhibitions). Titled ‘Wonderland’, the exhibition is a testament to the breadth of Leibovitz’s work, which spans her raw early work for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s – her subjects included Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Grace Slick, among others – and her later fashion photography, which emerged from a longstanding collaboration with American Vogue and its former editor-in-chief, now global editorial director, Anna Wintour.

At the latter, Leibovitz became known for her glossy, oftentimes fantastical, images of celebrities and models, which emerged from meticulous research and dramatic mise-en-scène (so the story goes, Leibovitz will gather hundreds of previous photographs of her subjects in order to achieve the perfect angle and composition). ‘Annie seems to travel through the world in the way of a wonderstruck stranger, meeting all the mad hatters and grinning cats,’ wrote Wintour in the introduction to Leibovitz’s 2021 monograph, which is also titled ‘Wonderland’. ‘She is our guide on journeys that we wish we all could take. These photographs open up an entry into her extraordinary world and lead us out the other end, toward a future that, we hope, we can watch unfold through her lens.’

Many of these images in the show have not previously been on display to the public – particularly those from her fashion oeuvre, which includes work which was not originally printed – and the exhibition marks the first retrospective of Leibovitz’s work in Spain. On Wednesday evening, an unsurprisingly high-profile coterie of guests descended on A Coruña for the preview – many of whom had been subjects of Leibovitz’s lens, or collaborated with her on the images. These included models Linda Evangelista, Karen Elson, and Carolyn Murphy, filmmakers Luca Guadagnino and Pedro Almodóvar, and designers Philip Treacy, Willy Chavarria, Ben Gorham, Vincent van Duysen and Samuel Ross.

The exhibition is divided into four sections, which span half a century of photography: these include an opening display of images taken during 1975 when Leibovitz was asked to be the Rolling Stones’ tour photographer by Jagger, sections titled ‘Early Years’ and ‘Stream of Consciousness’, while the final room, ‘Wonderland’, is a dramatic conclusion – featuring over 100 photographs of her fashion photography, it is a testament to her enduring image-making. ‘I held on to my fashion photographs over the years because I wasn’t sure where they belonged,’ she says. ‘Then I came to understand that all the pictures belong together.’

‘Annie has a magical ability to catch the aura of the people she is photographing. Her genius lies in her ability to consistently find the moments, the truths, that nobody else sees,’ adds Ortega Pérez. ‘I am thrilled that she will be the first woman to present work as part of our programme of world-class photography exhibitions here in A Coruña. Throughout her career, Annie has been an extraordinary champion of women of all ages – her images of older women in particular have a grandeur and beauty which is unparalleled.’

‘Wonderland’ opens to the public on 22 November 2025, at the MOP Foundation exhibition space in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. It runs until 1 May 2025.