Annie Leibovitz
If you've ever admired a celebrity photograph in Rolling Stone magazine or Vanity Fair, chances are very good that it was shot by Annie Leibovitz. Born in 1949, Leibovitz attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Hired at the then-fledgling Rolling Stone, magazine cofounder and publisher Jann Wenner quickly made her the chief photographer of the magazine, where she remained until 1983. During this period, Leibovitz established the magazine's signature visual style, with a panoply of iconic portraits: Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, a nude John Lennon hugging a clothed Yoko Ono. After joining Vanity Fair as the featured portrait photographer in 1983, Leibovitz continued to develop her unique look in portraiture: a heavily pregnant Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg in a tub of milk. Throughout, she has managed to get at the personality of the sitter in her photographs via a two-pronged approach that involves both getting to know intimately the work and passions of the sitter, while simultaneously getting them to do something silly or unusual in order to distract them from the artificiality of the photo shoot and allow their inner self to shine through. A long personal and intellectual relationship with the late Susan Sontag ended with Sontag's death in 2004, but still serves to this day as inspiration for Leibovitz' work. Anyone who is a celebrity - or would like to become one - seeks the photographic approval of Annie Leibovitz: even Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II sought her services for her official picture for her state visit to Virginia in 2007.
