Annie Leibovitz: The World’s Most Famous Photographer

She’s shot actors, presidents, even the Queen. We celebrate the 40-year career of the world’s most famous photographer.

- Michelle Davies

With opposition to America’s invasion of Vietnam growing by the day, 5 April 1969 saw thousands gather in the centre of San Francisco for a peaceful protest. Nineteen-year-old art student Annie Leibovitz was in the thick of it, taking photographs, when she stumbled across Beatnik poet and activist Allen Ginsberg smoking a joint. It was a fleeting interlude that produced a striking, monochrome image – one that, in a matter of months, would change her life.

‘I had a boyfriend who was a stringer [freelancer] for Time [magazine] and he said, “Why don’t you take your pictures to Rolling Stone?”’ she recalled. ‘I took them and they liked them.’

Rolling Stone, then a fold-up journal operating out of the Bay area, paid Annie $25 (£18) to publish the Ginsberg image – then offered her a job that would begin her career as one of the world’s most sought-after portrait photographers.

Now celebrating her fourth decade in the industry as she turns 67 in October, Leibovitz has photographed everyone from President Obama and the Queen to Kim and Kanye. She is responsible for some of the most iconic magazine covers of all time, including for Vanity Fair, a pregnant and naked Demi Moore, and Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn, and for Rolling Stone, a foetal-like John Lennon curled up against Yoko Ono – an image made more poignant by the fact he was assassinated four hours after she took it. ‘Her photography is heroic and owes more to the pageant and bluster of 18th-century paintings than the truth we usually seek from photography,’ says Lucy Davies, The Telegraph art and photography critic, who when interviewing Leibovitz observed, ‘[Her] portfolio could serve as a record of our times.’