Annie get your Jag
Annie Leibovitz has photographed Florence Pugh and the new Jaguar Type 01, casting them as two equal leads. The portrait series is the British actress’s first major visual outing as brand ambassador for Jaguar’s new era.
Beautiful cars and beautiful people. A combination that has always worked and is well known, though lately it has at times been discredited by accusations of sexism. What never changed was the casting. The human was decoration and the car was the star, or the other way round if the budget stretched to a celebrity. That it should be Annie Leibovitz, of all people, who now dismantles this order has a certain logic, and not only in terms of the zeitgeist. This is the woman who photographed John Lennon naked beside Yoko Ono, the Queen at Buckingham Palace and a pregnant Demi Moore for the cover of „Vanity Fair“. Hierarchies within the frame have been her stock-in-trade for fifty years. And the charge of sexism hardly sticks to a woman of her calibre (and if it does, then only in the very woke corners, where soon nobody will care to stray at all).
Lately, Jaguar’s model policy has caused more than a few furrowed brows among motoring types like me, and neither the endless unveilings of lavishly decorated prototypes nor the recent presentation of the „real“ goods managed to smooth them out. Only with the Leibovitz pictures (which I first spotted on our motoring portal) does Jaguar’s marketing make coherent sense again for the first time in ages, with a lot of things (if not quite everything) fitting together once more.
Two characters, one frame
Leibovitz herself describes the assignment as an encounter between two opposites. „Florence brings warmth, presence and humanity, while the Type 01 is sculptural, precise and striking in its form,“ she says of the new Jaguar in a statement. Rather than treating the car as a backdrop, she says, she photographed both with the same curiosity, as two independent figures in the picture. And that is exactly how Annie Leibovitz’s photos of the Jaguar Type 01 look: Pugh in black leather leaning against the silver flank, sitting in the pale interior, posing in a latex jumpsuit in front of an open door. The light is cool, the sky dramatic, the concrete setting brutalist. Neither of them smiles for the camera, and that is meant as a compliment.
Anyone who remembers the WIENER story on Helmut Newton’s car photography in Como will recognise the lineage. Newton charged cars with eroticism; Leibovitz psychoanalyses them. The difference is roughly that between a pin-up and a double portrait by a court painter.
Florence Pugh as the face of a turnaround
Florence Pugh, known for „Little Women“, „Midsommar“, „Oppenheimer“ and the Marvel universe, was introduced at the Type 01’s world premiere in New York as the first ambassador of Jaguar’s new era. WIENER reviewed her back in 2022 in „Don’t Worry Darling“. Now she is supposed to give an entire brand a face, and it badly needs one. At the end of 2024, Jaguar staged a relaunch with its „Copy Nothing“ campaign that left fans baffled and mockers delighted: colourful models, not a single car. Only after that came the Type 00 concept, and now the production car.
„Florence Pugh is the face of our new era. Annie Leibovitz is the lens,“ says Carlee Hardaker, Jaguar’s marketing and communications director. Pugh herself calls working with Leibovitz a „remarkable experience“ and says she has always been drawn to people and brands that are „uncompromisingly original“.
An old studio in New York
The connection goes beyond the shoot. The Type 01’s world premiere took place at STORIED in New York, a space that once housed Leibovitz’s studio. At the premiere, the guests were photographed by Frankie Aldino, a mentee of Leibovitz whom she personally recommended for the job. Styling for the portrait series was by Rebecca Corbin Murray, and the behind-the-scenes pictures are by Kathryn MacLeod.
The car itself is a four-door electric luxury GT, developed and built in Britain, and the first production model on Jaguar’s new JEA electric platform. The name is half nostalgia, half manifesto: „Type“ nods to the E-Type and its kin, the zero to zero tailpipe emissions, the one to the first of a new generation. Orders are expected to open in early 2027.
A look behind the camera
The making-of pictures are perhaps the most revealing of all. Leibovitz, silver plait, black quilted gilet, explains a pose to Pugh with both hands. Later she sits in a director’s chair between mirrored walls, looking at a tablet, while the Type 01 is parked in the mirror. A car contemplating itself while a legend works out how to look at it.
Whether the Type 01 saves Jaguar will ultimately be decided by customers, not photographers. But Leibovitz has pulled off something few still thought the brand capable of after „Copy Nothing“: people are looking again. And with a fair degree of pleasure.
