Annie Leibovitz

Photographer

• Born: October 2, 1949
• Place of Birth: Westbury, Connecticut

Leibovitz is known for her penetrating photographic portraits of celebrities, including actors, musicians, athletes, politicians, artists, and royalty.

Early Life

On October 2, 1949, Annie Leibovitz (LEE-boh-vihtz) was born into a Jewish family in Westbury, Connecticut. Her father, Samuel, was a career Air Force officer, and her mother, Marilyn, was a dance teacher. Leibovitz had five siblings, and the close-knit family lived on different military bases during her childhood. Between 1951 and 1961, they lived in Illinois, Ohio, Connecticut, Alaska, Colorado, Texas, Mississippi, and Maryland. She appreciated photography from an early age. There were regular family portraits, and her parents enjoyed making eight-millimeter films.

In 1967, Leibovitz graduated from Northwood High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, and entered the San Francisco Art Institute to study painting. In the summer of 1968, she traveled to Fuchu, Japan, where her mother attended University of Hawaii Extension Institute. In Japan, Leibovitz bought her first camera, a Minolta SR-T 101, and took photos on a Mount Fuji climb. After returning to the San Francisco Art Institute in the fall, she attended a photography class at night and changed her major to photography. She was influenced by the work of photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank.

Leibovitz spent part of her junior year on a kibbutz in Israel and further developed her skills by recording the experience in photographs. In 1970, she presented her portfolio to Jann Wenner, who, in 1967, had launched the music periodical Rolling Stone in San Francisco. Wenner hired Leibovitz and assigned her to photograph Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane band, for the cover of the November 12, 1970, issue of Rolling Stone. Her Rod Stewart portrait was the cover of the December 24, 1970, issue. Her next assignment was the legendary Beatle John Lennon, who appeared on the cover of the January 21, 1971, issue.

In 1971, Leibovitz graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. During 1971, her Rolling Stone covers included Peter Fonda, Elton John, George Harrison, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Beach Boys.

Life’s Work

In 1972, she photographed the Rolling Stones band for a Truman Capote article. Other covers included Alice Cooper, Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, and David Cassidy. In 1973, she was appointed chief photographer at Rolling Stone. In 1975, the Rolling Stones commissioned her to document their American tour: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards appeared on the July 17, 1975, cover.

Leibovitz worked for Rolling Stone through 1982 and left to work at Vanity Fair magazine in 1983. She had done 142 Rolling Stone covers, a gallery of the top contemporary popular musicians. One of her most famous portraits is the photograph of a nude Lennon embracing and kissing a fully clothed Yoko Ono on December 8, 1980, just hours before he was shot by a crazed fan. This picture was the cover of the January 22, 1981, Rolling Stone.

In 1983, she had her first major solo exhibition, which toured the United States and Europe. The companion book, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, was a best seller. In 1984, the American Society of Magazine Photographers named her Photographer of the Year. She was the official portrait photographer for the World Cup Games in Mexico in 1985.

In 1986, Leibovitz began doing advertising photography. Her portraits for an American Express ad campaign earned her a Clio Award and a Campaign of the Decade Award from Advertising Age in 1987. In the following years, she created successful campaigns for clients such as the Gap, the Milk Board, Honda, Disney, and Dior.

Leibovitz had a romantic relationship with the writer Susan Sontag from 1989 until Sontag’s death in 2004. They collaborated on Women (1999), photographs of women of different races, occupations, and ages. In October, 2001, Leibovitz’s daughter, Sarah Cameron, was born. In May, 2005, a surrogate mother gave birth to Leibovitz’s twin daughters, Susan and Samuelle.

In 1991, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, exhibited more than two hundred of Leibovitz’s photographs. It was just the second time that the gallery had honored a living photographer with such an exhibition. Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970–1990 (1991) accompanied this retrospective show. Her photographs of American athletes at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, were published in Olympic Portraits (1996).

In October, 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) named Leibovitz’s 1980 Rolling Stone photo of Lennon and Ono the best magazine cover of the past forty years, and her photo of a pregnant Demi Moore, which appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, won second place.

In contrast to the contentious relationships established by paparazzi, Leibovitz has a collaborative relationship with her celebrity subjects, who trust her to capture creatively their unique personalities. She was chosen exclusively to take the long-awaited first photographs of baby Suri, the daughter of actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, for the October 2006 issue of Vanity Fair. In 2009, Leibovitz took the official portrait of the Obama family. Her 2006 photograph of golfer Tiger Woods appeared on the cover of the February 2010 issue of Vanity Fair. In addition, that month, she did a self-portrait, posing with ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, for a Louis Vuitton ad campaign. Other advertising projects include Candie’s and Hewlett-Packard.

In 2011 Leibovitz published Pilgrimage, a collection of photos she took while not on assignment or commission. Unlike many of her other photographs, the collection focuses not on people, but on places she visited starting in August 2009, while in the middle of being sued by Art Capital Group for outstanding debt totaling $24 million (the suit was later settled). Many of the photos are of the living and work spaces of artists, writers, and cultural figures such as Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and were on a list of places she and Sontag had intended to visit. In 2014 Taschen, a German publisher, released a retrospective of Leibovitz’s work, Annie Leibovitz. The collection includes 250 photos of about 500 celebrities and cultural figures that Leibovitz had taken over a span of forty years.

Leibovitz’s photo of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of the July 2015 issue of Vanity Fair represented Jenner’s worldwide debut as a transgender woman. Later in 2015 the Swiss-based UBS bank commissioned Leibovitz to photograph portraits of prominent women as an extension of her Women series. The photographs, featuring Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sarandon, among others, are intended to become part of the bank’s permanent art collection.

Leibovitz's work appeared in the 2023 gallery "Annie Leibovitz at Work" at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The showcase included more than 300 photographs taken throughout Leibovitz's career.

Significance

One of the most celebrated photographers in the world, Leibovitz has received numerous honors, including the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in Applied Photography (1990), the Library of Congress designation as a Living Legend (2000), and France’s Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2006).

Leibovitz’s Jewish identity is evident in much of her work, such as her 1969 photos of life in a kibbutz in Israel and her coverage of the war between Lebanon and Israel in 1982 for Rolling Stone. She has also published photographs of family events following traditional Jewish customs.

Leibovitz has exhibited in major museums and galleries, including the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 2006, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) presented a documentary, Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens. During decades of photographing celebrities, Leibovitz evolved into a world-famous celebrity herself.

Bibliography

"Annie Leibovitz at Work." Crystal Bridges, 2024, crystalbridges.org/calendar/annie-leibovitz/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

“Annie Leibovitz Commissioned to Do Portraits of Influential Women for UBS Art Collection.” Art Media Agency. A&F Markets, 26 Aug. 2015. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.

Carter, Graydon, and David Friend. Vanity Fair, the Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images. New York: Abrams, 2008.

Kaye, Don. “The New Annie Leibovitz Book from Taschen Is Bigger than Your Apartment.” Vanity Fair. Condé Nast, 28 Feb. 2014. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.

Leibovitz, Annie. Annie Leibovitz at Work. New York: Random House, 2008.

Leibovitz, Annie. A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005. New York: Random House, 2006.

Leibovitz, Annie. Photographs, Annie Leibovitz, 1970–1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Leibovitz, Annie, and Susan Sontag. Women. New York: Random House, 1999.

Rectanus, Mark W. Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.