photography in all its forms

“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz has said, “this is one life, and the personal pictures and assignment work are all a part of it.”

Annie Leibovitz is one of the most celebrated photographers of our time and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. For over three decades she has made powerful and insightful pictures that have documented popular culture and those who have helped shape it.

This photograph of Merce Cunningham was originally published in the April 1994 issue of Vanity Fair and appears on the cover of the Aperture publication Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Cunningham was photographed by Leibovitz in her New York studio. (Another image from this session was published in Leibovitz’s most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005.) This gelatin-silver print was made from the original negative and is signed and numbered by artist on the recto.

Annie Leibovitz’s work was first seen in Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, where she was made chief photographer in 1973. Ten years later she moved on to Vanity Fair and became their first contributing photographer. After that, she began to do work for Vogue.

In addition to an extraordinary body of editorial work and signature celebrity portraits, Leibovitz also has crafted powerful and evocative imagery for numerous worldwide advertising campaigns for clients such as American Express, HBO, Givenchy, and GAP.

Her first book, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, was published in 1983; in 1991, her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970–1990, was held at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Her most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005, combines both her assignment and personal work and offers a rare look into the personal life of the artist. A subsequent museum retrospective, featuring over two hundred photographs from A Photographer’s Life debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2006 and is set to travel internationally. Leibovitz is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, chief among them France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. Annie Leibovitz was born in 1949 in Westbury, Connecticut, and attended the San Francisco Art Institute where she took evening classes in photography. She resides in New York City.