Seventy-three-years
old American photographer Annie Leibovitz is a newsroom ghost despite always being
behind the lens. Everything she does makes news.

This time she has shot two of the world’s biggest football superstars
Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo playing chess (Could be the idea of the
cerebral Leibovitz who often chooses how to place her subjects) for a Louis
Vuitton advertisement before the start of FIFA World Cup 2022.

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Who is Annie Leibovitz?

Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force and her mother was a dance instructor.

Lebovitz took her first pictures when he was stationed in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. She attended Northwood High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she became interested in various artistic endeavors and began to write and play music.

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Leibovitz attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied painting. She originally intended to become an art teacher. At school, she had her first photography workshop and changed her major to photography after she was inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

She started her career as a staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine. She was promoted to the position of the chief photographer in 1973, a job she would hold for 10 years. During her stint with the magazine, Leibovitz was the last person to professionally photograph John Lennon‍, before he was killed five hours later.   

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In 1983, Leibovitz’s new style of lighting and use of bold colors and poses got her a position with Vanity Fair magazine. In 1991, Leibovitz became the second living portraitist and the first woman to mount an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. In 1998, Leibovitz began to work regularly for Vogue.

In 2015, Leibovitz was the principal photographer for the 2016 Pirelli calendar, which focused on admirable women including Amy Schumer, Serena Williams, and Patti Smith.

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She also teaches photography on the Masterclass website. “There’s an idea that it’s hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it’s not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities,” Lebovitz famously said. 

When you think of Annie Leibovitz, what screaming photographs come to mind?: Demi Moore, pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair?
John Lennon, clinging to Yoko Ono hours before his death? Miles Davis, crashed on
a bed, pants unzipped, trumpet nearby, and a gleaming eye staring out?

In 2006, not
long after the deaths of her father and her longtime companion, Susan Sontag,
Leibovitz published a large and startling book, A Photographer’s Life:
1990-2005, a curious mix of celebrity portraits and snapshots from her private
life, including pictures of herself and of Sontag without clothes, of her
family members dying and being born, of herself pregnant at age fifty-one and,
most famously, of Sontag laid out on her deathbed in a crinkly black dress, The New Yorker had reported. 

A
few years after the book’s release, Leibovitz borrowed millions of dollars
against her real estate and photographs. Then she declared bankruptcy. “But
bankruptcy is not death,” Leibovitz said during a gallery talk at the
Smithsonian. “People do come back from bankruptcy.” And, she added, “I’m back.”

She has three daughters, Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle.