Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz was born a Jew in Connecticut in 1949. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for painting but after some time she found her passion for photography. She began her photography career working as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine and then became a published portrait photographer, where she worked for 10 years. Unfortunately, she attended drug rehabilitation because she was around so much drug use through the magazine. She was the last person ever to photograph John Lennon because he was killed 5 hours after their photo shoot in 1980. In that decade, she started working for Vanity Fair magazine and photographed celebrities and she got her first book, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, published. In 1991, she became the first woman, and second living portraitist to have her photographs in the National Portrait Gallery. She has three children: Sarah, Susan, and Samuel and Annie was very close with Susan Sontag, who died at age 71 in 2004. Her most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, includes pictures that she has taken of celebrities, along with pictures of herself with her family.