Anna-Lou Leibovitz ( ; born October 2, 1949) is an American portrait photographer best known for her portraits, particularly of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Leibovitz's Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken five hours before Lennon's murder, is considered one of Rolling Stone magazine's most famous cover photographs. The Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend, and she is the first woman to have a feature exhibition at Washington's National Portrait Gallery.
Leibovitz was a student in the 1970s when her photos were published for the first time: pictures of Vietnam War protesters in Israel, taken on assignment for Rolling Stone, one of which landed on the cover. Since then, she has captured film stars, politicians, athletes, royalty and artists for features and cover stories in other major publications, including Vanity Fair, Vogue and Time.
Early life and education Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on October 2, 1949, Anna-Lou Leibovitz is the third of six children of Marilyn Edith (née Heit) and Samuel Leibovitz. She is a third-generation American. Her father was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force of Romanian-Jewish heritage and her mother was a modern dance instructor of Estonian-Jewish heritage. Her love for photography began at a young age when her father gave her a camera. The family moved frequently with her father's duty assignments, and she took her first pictures when he was stationed in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. After her family returned from the Philippines, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied painting and photography. Leibovitz's passion for art was born out of her mother's engagement with dance, music, and painting.
While attending Northwood High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, she became interested in various artistic endeavors and began to write and play music.
Leibovitz attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied painting with the intention of becoming an art teacher. At school, she had her first photography workshop and changed her major to photography. She was inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. For several years, she continued to develop her photography skills while holding various jobs, including a stint on a kibbutz in Amir, Israel, for several months in 1969. Leibovitz attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1967 until 1971. By the time Leibovitz received her bachelor of fine arts degree in 1971, her photographs of Israel and a picture of the poet Allen Ginsberg at a San Francisco peace march had already landed her a job at the music magazine Rolling Stone.
Career For many years, Leibovitz's camera of choice was a Mamiya RZ67. She also has used the following cameras:
Hasselblad 500 C/M Minolta SRT-101 Nikon D810 Fuji 6×9 medium format camera (a.k.a. The 'Texas Leica') Canon 5D Mark II Hasselblad H5D
1970–1980
Rolling Stone When Leibovitz returned to the United States in 1970, she started her career as staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of Rolling Stone, a job she would hold for 10 years. Leibovitz worked for the magazine until 1983, and her intimate photographs of celebrities helped define the Rolling Stone look.
While working for Rolling Stone, Leibovitz learned that she could work for magazines and still create personal work of her family, which for her was the most important: "You don't get the opportunity to do this kind of intimate work except with the people you love, the people who will put up with you. They're the people who open their hearts and souls and lives to you. You must take care of them."
The Rolling Stones Leibovitz photographed the Rolling Stones in San Francisco in 1971 and 1972, and served as the concert-tour photographer for the Rolling Stones' Tour of the Americas '75. Her favorite photo from the tour was a photo of Mick Jagger in an elevator.Leibovitz, A. (2008).At Work. New York City, NY: Random House. . The mid-1970s brought Leibovitz an increasing amount of notoriety and its concomitant tribulations. In 1975, the Rolling Stones invited Leibovitz to document their six-month concert tour. Living in the world of her subjects, her camera did not shield Leibovitz from the rock 'n' roll life-style. She began using cocaine on tour and struggled for years afterward to recover.
John Lennon
On December 8, 1980, Leibovitz had a photo shoot with John Lennon for Rolling Stone, and she promised him he would make the cover. She had initially tried to get a picture with just Lennon alone, as Rolling Stone wanted, but Lennon insisted that both he and Yoko Ono be on the cover. Leibovitz then tried to re-create something like the kissing scene from the couple's Double Fantasy album cover, a picture Leibovitz loved. She had Lennon remove his clothes and curl up next to Ono on the floor. Leibovitz recalls,
Leibovitz was the last person to professionally photograph Lennon—he was shot and killed five hours later. About a month later, Rolling Stone gave grieving music fans his "last image".
The photograph was subsequently re-created in 2009 by the couple's son Sean Lennon posing with his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl, with male/female roles reversed (Lennon clothed, Kemp naked), and by Henry Bond and Sam Taylor-Wood in their YBA pastiche on October 26, 1993.
1980–2000
Leibovitz's new style of lighting and use of bold colors and poses got her a position with Vanity Fair magazine in 1983.
Leibovitz photographed celebrities for an international advertising campaign for American Express charge cards, which won a Clio award in 1987.
In 1991, Leibovitz mounted an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. She was the second living portraitist and first woman to show there. That same year, Leibovitz was also made by the French government. Also in 1991, Leibovitz emulated Margaret Bourke-White's feat by mounting one of the eagle gargoyles on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, where she photographed the dancer David Parsons cavorting on another eagle gargoyle. Noted Life photographer and picture editor John Loengard made a gripping photo of Leibovitz at the climax of her danger (Loengard was photographing Leibovitz for The New York Times that day).
In 1994, Leibovitz photographed Carl Lewis for Pirelli's famous Power Is Nothing Without Control ad campaign. The most well-known advertisement featured Lewis crouched in a sprinting position sporting bright red stilettos.
In 1998, Leibovitz began to work regularly for Vogue.
2000–present Brooklyn Museum retrospective In 2007, a major retrospective of Leibovitz's work was held at the Brooklyn Museum. The retrospective was based on her book, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 and included many of her professional (celebrity) photographs and numerous personal photographs of her family, children, and partner Susan Sontag. This show, which was expanded to include three official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, then went on the road for seven stops. It was on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from October 2007 to January 2008 and at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco from March 2008 to May 2008. In February 2009, the exhibition was moved to Berlin, Germany. The show included 200 photographs. This exhibition and her talk focused on her personal photographs and life.
Other work In 2007, The Walt Disney Company hired her to do a series of photographs with celebrities in various roles and scenes for the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts "Year of a Million Dreams" campaign. In 2010, Fotografiska Stockholm opened with inaugural exhibitions that included Annie Leibovitz's "A Photographer's Life, 1990 to 2005." In 2011, Leibovitz was nominated alongside Singaporean photographer Dominic Khoo and Wing Shya for Asia Pacific Photographer of the Year. In October 2011, Leibovitz had an exhibit in Moscow. In an interview with Rossiya 24, she explained her photography style. In 2014, Leibovtiz did a shoot of Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and their daughter North West for an article in Vanity Fair. In the same year, the New-York Historical Society mounted an exhibit of Leibovitz's work, based on her 2011 book, Pilgrimages. From January 2016 to February 2017, WOMEN: New Portraits, commissioned by UBS and reflecting the changing roles of women, was shown in 10 cities worldwide. In 2017, Leibovitz announced the release of an online photography class entitled "Annie Leibovitz Teaches Photography". In January 2018, Leibovitz's cover photo for Vanity Fair was criticized online for image manipulation that appeared to show actress Reese Witherspoon with three legs. February–April 2019: "Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970–1983: Archive Project No. 1" at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Los Angelesart-April 2019: In 2025, Leibovitz produced several portraits for the television series The Chosen.
Pirelli calendar
In 2015, Leibovitz was the principal photographer for the 2016 Pirelli calendar. Leibovitz took a drastic shift from the calendar traditional style by focusing on admirable women as opposed to sexuality. The calendar included Amy Schumer, Serena Williams, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz had previously worked on the 2000 calendar.
IKEA In 2023, Leibovitz was commissioned by IKEA to "create a series of 25 portraits that illuminate the nuances of 'life at home'."
Crystal Bridges: Annie Leibovitz at Work Running from September 16, 2023, to January 29, 2024, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art hosted "Annie Leibovitz at Work", an exhibition of more than 300 images encompassing more than 50 years of Leibovitz's career. Vogue magazine called the show "a sweeping retrospective of 300 photographs taken by Leibovitz throughout her illustrious career. The works on display range from celebrity portraiture to images from the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair to indelible moments in history like the Apollo 17 launch and Watergate. In one room, a table piled high with photo books is paired with a set of cheeky Polaroid snaps of policemen who have ticketed Leibovitz over the years for driving too fast in her '63 Porsche on California's Highway 5. With the prints pinned up on the first two sections of gallery walls in a strikingly relaxed format, the show feels akin to a tour of her studio."
Controversies Queen Elizabeth II photoshoot In 2007, the BBC misrepresented Leibovitz's portrait shooting of Queen Elizabeth II to take the Queen's official picture for her state visit to Virginia. This was filmed for the BBC documentary A Year with the Queen. A promotional trailer for the film showed the Queen reacting incredulously to Leibovitz's suggestion ("less dressy") that she remove her tiara, stating "less dressy? What do you think this is?" This cut immediately to a scene of the Queen walking down a corridor, telling an aide "I'm not changing anything. I've had enough dressing like this, thank you very much." The BBC later apologized and admitted that the sequence of events had been misrepresented, as the Queen was in fact walking to the sitting in the second scene, not storming off from it like the BBC implied by presenting the scenes in that order. This led to a BBC scandal and a shake-up of ethics training. However, a 2015 article in The Times contradicts this story. It stated that the Queen was both incredulous at being asked to remove her crown as "no-one tells her what to do" and insulted, as the item was only a tiara.
LeBron James / King Kong photoshoot