By Diane Smyth

Since 1993, Italian coffee producer Lavazza has commissioned many of the biggest stars of contemporary photography to shoot its annual promotional calendar. Under the watchful gaze of Francesca Lavazza, the company’s corporate image director, and the Milan ad agency Armando Testa, photographers such as Helmut Newton, Ellen Von Unwerth and David LaChapelle have all taken their turn, shooting images also used in Lavazza’s international ad campaigns. This year the honor fell to Annie Leibovitz.
‘We have a long tradition of working with big photographers and we felt Annie was perfect for this project,’ Francesca Lavazza tells Photoserve. ‘We felt she would be able to present the authenticity we wanted to bring to it. Every person in front of her became very real because she was able to underline their real nature.’
Each year's calendar is organized around a theme and this year Armando Testa came up with the tagline "The Italian Espresso Experience."  The agency came up with concepts seven images (one for every two months plus a cover image), each illustrating a different theme of Italian life: cuisine, fashion, culture, seduction, cinema, the legendary founding of Rome (by twins raised by a she-wolf)   and the annual Carnevale in Venice.
"We tried to think of the areas in which Italy is most strong," explains Michele Mariani, creative director of the company. "For us coffee isn’t just about the experience of drinking, it’s all the things around the cup, too: friends, family and experience.’"
The ad agency also worked out comps for each shot, but Leibovitz was given the freedom to interpret them as she wished. She was given the green light to shoot the models in the US, when it became clear that time and budgetary constraints would not allow her to work on location. Instead she shot the locations in Italy over the course of three weeks, then returned to New York to shoot the models in-studio. The   portraits and backgrounds were then matched in post-production. It was far from the original plan but, says Lavazza, Leibovitz’s meticulous planning ensured it ran smoothly.
"She did an incredible amount of preparation," Lavazza notes.  "Every point was discussed before shooting. That meant she always knew exactly how to match the portraits and backgrounds, because she knew exactly how she wanted each end image to look.’
The New York shoot lasted just six days but Leibovitz and her studio crew then worked on the images in post-production for one and a half months. Unusually, they left the models almost entirely un-retouched – a bold move but one which, to Mariani, was key to the whole concept of the calendar. "We didn’t want typical, glamorous, artificial images," he says.  "We wanted to convey the idea of authenticity.’
The calendar has now been distributed to Lavazza’s vendors and business contacts, and three images from the project have been chosen for the international ad campaign:  the Vetruvia, a reworking of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man;  a shot of Rome's Trevi Fountain that recalls the famous scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vitta; and the twin founders of Rome and their fur-clad mother. The Trevi image will be used in press and outdoor sites in the UK, Canada, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland alongside a short TV campaign, while the other two images will be used across the rest of Europe. As Francesca Lavazza puts it: "The calendar is just the tip of the iceberg in our communications project.’"