Annie Leibovitz

Leibovitz grew up moving with her father's Air Force postings, and picked up a camera as a teenager while the family was stationed in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. She studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute starting in 1967 and switched to photography partway through, citing Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson as the photographers who redirected her. She graduated with a fine arts degree in 1971 and, within months, was shooting for Rolling Stone, then a scrappy biweekly music magazine still finding its identity. Publisher Jann Wenner made her chief photographer in 1973, when she was 24, and for the next decade her intimate, unguarded portraits of musicians became as much a part of the magazine's voice as anything written in it.

The photograph that defined her came near the end of that decade at Rolling Stone: a Polaroid of John Lennon curled naked around a clothed Yoko Ono, shot on December 8, 1980, hours before Lennon was murdered. She has called it the photograph of her life. In 1983 she moved to Vanity Fair, where bolder color and studio lighting replaced the documentary look of the Rolling Stone years, and her subjects widened to Hollywood, fashion and heads of state, including a 2007 sitting with Queen Elizabeth II. The 1991 nude portrait of a pregnant Demi Moore became one of the most reproduced magazine covers. Retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and, in 2023, the Crystal Bridges Museum have since treated the body of work as a record of four decades of American celebrity.

The work carried real cost alongside the fame. In February 2009, facing renovation debts on her Greenwich Village properties, she borrowed 15.5 million dollars against her homes and the rights to her own photograph archive, an arrangement The New York Times likened to pawning her life's work. The loan went into default before a 2010 restructuring protected it. Several shoots also drew sustained criticism: a 2008 Vogue cover pairing LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen was read as echoing King Kong imagery, and a 2008 Vanity Fair shoot of a 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, wrapped in a sheet, provoked apologies from both photographer and magazine. Her 14-year relationship with the writer Susan Sontag, which she later called a love story, ran alongside the professional highs and the financial trouble until Sontag's death in 2004.

Leibovitz kept working through all of it. She had her first daughter, Sarah, at 52 in 2001, and twin daughters by surrogate in 2005, raising all three as a single parent. The Library of Congress named her a Living Legend, and she has continued major commissions into the mid-2020s, including portrait work for the television series The Chosen in 2025. Her reputation, unlike those of the dead subjects in this batch, is still being written — the archive she once nearly lost to creditors is now the thing institutions compete to exhibit, and the debate over her more provocative shoots has settled into something closer to case study than scandal.

Annie Leibovitz's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• John Lennon and Yoko Ono Polaroid artwork
  Shot for Rolling Stone hours before Lennon's murder 1980
• Demi Moore, Vanity Fair cover artwork
  A pregnant nude portrait, widely reproduced since 1991
• Queen Elizabeth II portrait sitting artwork
  Commissioned to mark a royal U.S. visit 2007
• A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 book
  A memoir in photographs, including images of Susan Sontag's illness and death 2006
• Portraits for The Chosen artwork
  Television series portraiture, part of her continuing commercial work 2025

• 1967 aged ~18 Enrolls at the San Francisco Art Institute to study painting
• 1971 aged ~22 Graduates and begins shooting for Rolling Stone
• 1973 aged ~24 Named chief photographer of Rolling Stone at 24
• December 8, 1980 aged 31 Photographs John Lennon and Yoko Ono hours before Lennon's death
• 1983 aged ~34 Moves to Vanity Fair
• 1989 aged ~40 Begins her relationship with Susan Sontag It continued until Sontag's death in 2004.
• February 2009 aged 59 Borrows 15.5 million dollars against her homes and photograph archive
• March 2010 aged 60 Colony Capital restructures her financing and protects her archive
• 2023 aged ~74 A retrospective of over 300 photographs opens at the Crystal Bridges Museum

• Bruce Springsteen b. 1949
  Songwriter whose music made working-class life, aspiration, and disappointment central themes of American rock. a longtime Rolling Stone subject
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. photographed his family in the White House
• LeBron James b. 1984
  NBA superstar and philanthropist considered one of the greatest basketball players in history. photographed for a widely debated Vogue cover
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. photographed for a book cover