Annie Leibovitz
Her carefully staged portraits helped define the public images of musicians, actors and political figures.
Annie Leibovitz was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1949. She grew up in a military family that moved frequently and studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute before turning to photography.
She began working for Rolling Stone in 1970 and became its chief photographer in 1973. On 8 December 1980 she photographed a naked John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono; Lennon was killed later that day. The image became one of her best-known portraits.
Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair in 1983 and began working regularly for Vogue in 1998. Her 1991 cover photograph of the pregnant Demi Moore attracted intense attention. Elaborate settings, lighting and collaboration with her subjects became hallmarks of a practice that has encompassed performers, athletes, presidents and royalty.
Her relationship with Susan Sontag began in the late 1980s and continued until Sontag’s death in 2004. “A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005” (2006) placed public commissions alongside intimate photographs of Sontag and Leibovitz’s family. In doing so, it made visible a private world that celebrity portraits alone could not convey. Leibovitz is the mother of three daughters.