For over 50 years, Annie Leibovitz has been creating a body of work that is unequaled in breadth and influence. From the viscerally immediate reportage made for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s and extending through the more stylized portraiture of her work for Vanity Fair and Vogue, her pictures make up what is essentially a family album of our time.

In 2014, in close collaboration with Annie, TASCHEN published a SUMO edition of her work: over 200 photographs, many of them famous (the naked John Lennon entwined in a last embrace with Yoko Ono, Patti Smith on fire) and some rarely, if ever, seen before. In 2022, to accommodate a wider audience, this volume was recreated as an unlimited XXL edition.

The XXL volume is now available as an Art Edition in four different versions, each accompanied by a signed, numbered and framed dye-sublimation ChromaLuxe aluminum print. Patti Smith, New Orleans, 1978 is included in an edition of 275 copies.

In 1978, Annie Leibovitz was on the road with Patti Smith and her band, following them around for a cover story in Rolling Stone. Patti’s second album had come out and a single on it, “Because the Night,” was in the Top Twenty. It would be the only top-of-the-charts song Patti ever had, although her career is still flourishing. Annie decided to do the cover shot in New Orleans and she wanted a huge wall of flame for it, maybe because of the line “Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe” in “Because the Night.” They rented a warehouse and set fire to several barrels of kerosene, despite the fact that it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit inside already. “In those days you could do things like that,” Annie recalls. “We didn’t think about getting fire department permits or anything. The warehouse didn’t burn down, miraculously, although Patti’s back got a little singed.”

Art Edition “Patti Smith” (No. 1–275). Hardcover volume in a slipcase, accompanied by the portrait Patti Smith, New Orleans, 1978.

Also available: the Art Editions “Keith Haring” (No. 1–1,000); “Whoopi Goldberg” (No. 1–450); and “David Byrne” (No. 1–275). ChromaLuxe prints are numbered and signed by Annie Leibovitz. Total copies of the four Art Editions: 2,000.