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Annie Leibovitz was born in Westbury, Connecticut in 1949, one of six children. Her father was an Air Force lieutenant, and her family moved many times during her childhood. In the late 1960s, Leibovitz spent time on a kibbutz and an architectural dig at King Solomon's temple in Israel. She bought her first camera while traveling with her mother in Japan in 1968.
Leibovitz studied painting in college and received a degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971, but she continued to photograph. Her work documenting a peace demonstration, and in particular, a photograph of Allen Ginsberg caught the attention of art director Robert Kingsbury at Rolling Stone magazine. She was hired by the magazine in 1970 and became their chief photographer in 1973. During her tenure at the magazine, she was the official photographer for the Rolling Stones rock band on their 1975 world tour. One of her most famous magazine covers featured a photograph of a nude John Lennon hugging a clothed Yoko Ono, taken in 1980, just hours before Lennon's tragic death.
After leaving Rolling Stone in 1983, Leibovitz began working for Vanity Fair. Her subjects included presidents, famous authors, teenage idols, and numerous actors and other celebrities. Among the most controversial portraits featured on Vanity Fair were covers of a pregnant, nude, Demi Moore, and of actress Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk.
Leibovitz contributed to the success of several prestigious and often award-winning advertising campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. She did a series of celebrity portraits for American Express in the 1980s and was awarded a CLIO advertising award for this series in 1988. Leibovitz also photographed celebrities such as Naomi Campbell and Lauren Bacall with milk mustaches for the much touted “got milk?” campaign which began in 1994. Her advertising work is widely acclaimed, and she was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1999.
During the past two decades, Leibovitz's success as a photographer has led to highly regarded publications, exhibitions, and a variety of projects outside of her much celebrated magazine work. Among her more notable accomplishments were: the publication of her first book, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs (1983): as official portrait photographer for the World Cup Games in Mexico (1984); as the second woman to receive a retrospective exhibition of her work at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (1991); her documentation of the aftermath of war in Sarajevo, Bosnia (1994); as official photographer of the 1996 Olympics (her black-and-white photos of American Olympians were featured in the book Olympic Portraits); a collaboration with essayist Susan Sontag on the book Women (1999); and as a recipient of the “Living Legend” award from the Library of Congress (2000).
In the past several years, Leibovitz has continued to contribute to Vanity Fair magazine where her work can be seen regularly. In 2001, she took time out from her career to start a family giving birth to her first daughter Sarah Cameron Leibovitz (named after 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron). Leibovitz has two other daughters. Her projects have continued with the traveling exhibition and publication American Music organized by the Experience Music Project, Seattle, in 2004. Her latest book and exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 (release date October 2006; exhibition opens at the Brooklyn Museum also October 2006) will feature work from both her professional career and her personal life.
PHOTO: Willie Nelson, Luck Ranch, Spicewood, Texas, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Annie Leibovitz.
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