Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz (born October 2, 1949, Waterbury, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American photographer renowned for her dramatic, quirky, and iconic portraits of a great variety of celebrities. Her signature style is crisp and well lighted.

Leibovitz’s father had a military career, and her mother was a dancer. The family was living in the Philippines in 1967 when Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute (B.F.A., 1971), intending to become a painter. After taking a night class in photography, however, she quickly became engrossed in that medium. In 1970, while still a student, she was given her first commercial assignment for Rolling Stone magazine: to photograph John Lennon. Three years later Leibovitz became the publication’s chief photographer, directing her energies toward a unique presentation of the major personalities of contemporary rock music. In 1975 she documented the Rolling Stones’ six-month North American concert tour, during which she shot several widely reproduced photographs of guitarist Keith Richards and lead singer Mick Jagger. (She also became addicted to cocaine, a habit she kicked some years later when she joined the staff of Vanity Fair magazine.) Perhaps her most famous work from this period is a portrait of Lennon and Yoko Ono that was published on the cover of Rolling Stone in January 1981. In the picture, shot mere hours before Lennon’s assassination, the singer-songwriter is nude and wrapped like a fetus around his fully clothed wife.

In 1983 Leibovitz produced a 60-print show that toured Europe and the United States. The accompanying book, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, was a best seller. That same year she joined the staff of Vanity Fair, which broadened her pool of subjects to include film stars, athletes, and political figures. For her portraits, Leibovitz—who viewed her photographic sessions as collaborations—typically spent days observing her subjects’ daily lives and worked to make her portraits of them unique and witty, each a technically exquisite distillation. Her commercial images were dramatic and staged rather than casual.

She received the American Society of Magazine Photographers award for photographer of the year in 1983. She began to work as an advertising photographer in 1986, gaining such clients as Honda, American Express (the “Portraits” campaign), and the Gap (“Individual of Style” campaign). The American Express ad campaign that used her photos won a Clio Award, recognizing advertising excellence worldwide, in 1987. She later was involved in the California Milk Processor Board (the “Got Milk?” campaign) and shot a series of ads featuring celebrities as Disney characters for Disney theme parks. In 2011 she photographed seven top female athletes for the sportswear company Nike’s “Make Yourself” campaign. Her style throughout these projects was characterized by carefully staged settings, superb lighting, and her trademark use of vivid colour.

In 1991 Leibovitz had her first museum exhibition; she became the first woman and second living photographer to show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. A companion book, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970–1990, was published in 1991. She also earned much praise for her portraits of American Olympians taken for an exhibit at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, which were later published in the book Olympic Portraits (1996). In 1999 she published a collection of photographs titled Women, with an essay by intellectual and writer Susan Sontag, who was her lover. An exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., accompanied the publication. In 2016 Leibovitz updated the series and presented it as a traveling exhibition, “Women: New Portraits.”

In 2000 Leibovitz was among the first group of Americans to be designated a Library of Congress Living Legend. Among the later publications of her work were American Music (2003); A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005 (2006), which contained many images documenting Leibovitz’s personal life; Annie Leibovitz at Work (2008); and Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005–2016 (2017). Leibovitz’s perfectionism in her work (budgets were exploded, and no expense was spared) and her celebrity-touched lifestyle had a role in producing a debt of $24 million, for which she was sued in 2009. The suit against her was settled, and the glare of publicity was deflected somewhat when her official portrait of the first family—U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Sasha and Malia—was released to the public later that year.

The photographer’s achievements were celebrated in Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens (2009), a documentary film made for public television’s American Masters series by her sister Barbara. During her financial difficulties, Leibovitz began working on a personal project, photographing places and objects that were meaningful to her, and the images were collected in the book Pilgrimage (2011).