Mention the name Annie Leibovitz, and some iconic images of 20th-century pop culture immediately spring to mind. There's her photograph of rocker Bruce Springsteen's backside, gracing the cover of his album Born in the USA. There's the heavily pregnant actress Demi Moore posing for the front of Vanity Fair. But after a career that now spans four decades - and her thousands of pictures of musicians, actors, politicians and business figures - the 62-year-old's sprawling portfolio is as much about the individuals she photographed as it is about how the world, especially the West, has changed.
Here's a case in point: Leibovitz took a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was competing for the Mr Olympia title in South Africa in 1975, as a muscleman. 'I remember I'd come off a Rolling Stones tour, and Mick Jagger, who was very skinny, was a sex symbol. By contrast, Arnold looked like a freak to me back then, like something from Mars,' she says. 'But now that look is considered an acceptable aesthetic, although perhaps not quite that blown-out.'
Then there's the picture, taken in 2001, of former US president George W. Bush surrounded by his staff: Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, CIA head George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Only 11 years old, it's a portrait of a very different America.
Hong Kong will be able to catch some of these compelling narratives when a selection of Leibovitz's work, which she says is culled from her own 'master set' of photographs, goes on show at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery on Hollywood Road from May 17. Curated by Tagore himself, the solo exhibition is said to revolve around the theme of 'power in public and private spheres'.
There are shots of musicians such as David Byrne and Patti Smith, and presidents Bush and Bill Clinton. There's even a photograph of Star Wars robot R2-D2 in storage at Britain's Pinewood Studios. 'I felt that, with this exhibition, I had a responsibility to reflect the history of the last 40 years,' Leibovitz says by telephone from her studio in New York.
'There is all kinds of wonderful history in these pictures. Sundaram curated the exhibition from a 156-picture master set of my work that I had started developing. That is an eclectic and strange set of pictures. It's an edit of work I have thought about a great deal. These are, to my mind, some of my more iconic pictures. They show me achieving a certain threshold in my work.'