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For this special issue, however, Leibovitz has selected images from what she calls her "Master Set." Many are well known, but not all. Many feature public personalities shot for magazines, but others are highly intimate and deeply private. A few, such as her 1968 image of soldiers at Clark Air Base, made at age 19 with the first camera she ever owned, are of historical interest. All of the images, says Leibovitz, capture some essential aspect of her photography. The Master Set is this remarkable photographer's own articulation of vision-of what makes an Annie picture an Annie picture.

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The Master Set: Annie Leibovitz Portfolio

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For this special issue, however, Leibovitz has selected images from what she calls her "Master Set." Many are well known, but not all. Many feature public personalities shot for magazines, but others are highly intimate and deeply private.

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How Annie Leibovitz drew star power from the Rolling Stones | Photography | Agenda | Phaidon

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In Annie Leibovitz at Work, she explains how she picked up 'power by association' shooting their 1975 tour

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The Last Word: Annie Leibovitz Looks Back on a Legendary Career

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Annie Leibovitz reflects on her classic Rolling Stone shoots, learning from her heroes and changing rock & roll photography

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Quick Facts
"I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.""We took care of each other. I had great respect and admiration for [Susan Sontag], and I wanted to make everything possible for her, whatever she needed. I felt like a person who is taking care of a great monument.""A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.""Working at 'Rolling Stone' was a drug culture. Who were my mentors? Hunter Thompson, who was a total maniac, never off drugs. Cocaine propelled you... it made you think you were thinking. I got professional help, and it was done.""I love raising my children. I thought the world was flat before I had my kids, and now it's round."

Name

Annie Leibovitz

Birth Date

October 2, 1949 (age 70)

Education

San Francisco Art Institute

Place of Birth

Waterbury, Connecticut

Full Name

Anna-Lou Leibovitz

Zodiac Sign

Libra

Annie Leibovitz, considered one of America's best portrait photographers, developed her trademark use of bold colors and poses while at 'Rolling Stone.'

Who Is Annie Leibovitz?

Annie Leibovitz is a portrait photographer who in 1970 landed a job at Rolling Stone and went on to create a distinctive look for the publication as chief photographer. In 1983, she began working for the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair, continuing to produce images that would be deemed iconic and provocative. Having also worked on high-profile advertising campaigns, Leibovitz's images have been showcased in several books and major exhibitions around the world.

Early Life and Chief Photographer for 'Rolling Stone'

Anna-Lou Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. She was one of six children born to Sam, an Air Force lieutenant, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor. In 1967, Leibovitz enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, where (although initially studying painting) she developed a love for photography.

After living briefly on an Israeli kibbutz, the statuesque Leibovitz returned to the United States and applied for a job with the start-up rock music magazine Rolling Stone in 1970. Impressed with Leibovitz's portfolio, which included an image of counter-culture icon Allen Ginsberg, editor Jann Wenner offered her a job as a staff photographer. Within two years, the 23-year-old Leibovitz was promoted to chief photographer, a title she would hold for the next decade. Her position with the magazine afforded her the opportunity to accompany the Rolling Stones band on their 1975 international tour, though she lost herself from the experience and ended up grappling with a crippling drug addiction.

While with Rolling Stone, Leibovitz developed her trademark technique, which involved the use of bold primary colors and surprising poses, as seen with a 1979 Bette Midler cover inspired by the rock music film The Rose. Leibovitz is credited with making many Rolling Stone covers collector's items, including an issue that featured a nude John Lennon curled around his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono. Taken on December 8, 1980, Leibovitz's Polaroid of the former Beatle was shot just hours before his death.

Iconic Covers for 'Vanity Fair'

In 1983, Leibovitz left Rolling Stone and began working for Vanity Fair. With a wider array of subjects, Leibovitz's photographs for the magazine ranged from presidents to literary icons to teen heartthrobs. Leibovitz's shoots also became known for over-the-top budgets that would later be at the center of major financial challenges.

To date, a number of Vanity Fair covers have featured Leibovitz's stunning-and often controversial-portraits of celebrities. Demi Moore (very pregnant and very nude followed by a body painting shoot), Whoopi Goldberg (half-submerged in a bathtub of milk), Sylvester Stallone (appearing nude in a pose inspired by Rodin's "The Thinker") and Caitlyn Jenner (in a corset after having publicly revealed her identity as a woman) are among the most remembered celebs to grace the cover. Known for her ability to make her sitters become physically involved in her work, another of Leibovitz's most famous portraits is of the late artist Keith Haring, who painted himself like a canvas for the photo.

The Olympics

During the 1980s, Leibovitz also started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. One of her most notable projects was for American Express, for which her portraits of celebrity cardholders like Elmore Leonard, Tom Selleck and Luciano Pavarotti earned her a 1987 Clio Award.

In 1991, Leibovitz's collection of more than 200 photographs were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She was the first woman to be so honored. Later that year, a book was published to accompany the show titled Photographs: Annie Leibovitz, 1970-1990. In 1996, Leibovitz worked as the official photographer of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. A compilation of her black-and-white portraits of American athletes, including Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson, were published in the book Olympic Portraits.

Book, Exhibitions and Additional Projects

Widely considered one of America's best portrait photographers, Leibovitz published the book Women (1999), which was accompanied by an essay by her romantic partner, famed intellectual Susan Sontag. With its title subject matter, Leibovitz presented an array of female images from Supreme Court justices to Vegas showgirls to coal miners and farmers. The project is continued as a traveling exhibition, making a London debut in January 2016.

In 2003, Leibovitz published the book American Music, with an emphasis on important figures in the realm of blues, country, folk, hip-hop and jazz. Then in 2006, the Brooklyn Museum of Art presented the retrospective "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005," with a related book published as well. This was later followed by "Pilgrimage," a touring exhibition that debuted in Washington, D.C., in 2012 and focused on items associated with famous figures like Abraham Lincoln and Marian Anderson. As busy as ever, Leibovitz continues to be in demand as a photographer, working on projects that range from a 2014 Marcs & Spencer advertising campaign to the 2016 calendar for the tire manufacturer Pirelli. For the latter, Liebovitz chose to feature mostly clothed women from a variety of backgrounds and ages in contrast to the images of scantily clad models from previous calendars.

Personal Life

Leibovitz and Sontag were in a 15-year relationship that ended with Sontag's death in 2004, with Leibovitz's father passing away just weeks later. The two women traveled globally and found interconnections with their work, with Sontag encouraging Leibovitz to become more intimate with her photography.

Leibovitz is also the mother of three children. At the age of 51, she had her daughter, Sarah. In 2005, twin daughters Susan and Samuelle were born with the help of a surrogate mother.

Fact Check

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"I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time." "We took care of each other.

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Arnold Newman said that photography is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent moving furniture. I think about that sometimes when we're on location and we've moved the set-the stage, the lights, the backdrop, sandbags, fans. And moved them again. And again. I just have to close my eyes to everything that's being done. The manual labor is daunting.

It didn't start out that way. In the beginning, I traveled alone. I carried my equipment and if I used a light I would set it up myself. Some people took the results as a style. A writer for American Photographer once said that the umbrella and strobe reflected in the mirror in my portrait of Jimmy Carter was a "skillfully implemented device." As I recall, I walked into the room holding the light and set it down and plugged it in and started taking pictures. I didn't think about it.

I first worked with an assistant in 1975, during the Rolling Stones tour. I wanted to photograph the band together right after the show, when they were pumped up, and I had been talking to them about this for weeks. I told them how fantastic they looked all sweaty, but I could never get them to stop for the photograph. So one night in Los Angeles I hired an assistant who helped me hang a roll of seamless paper and set up a strobe outside the stage door. They had to walk across the paper to get to their cars. When they saw it they laughed and stopped and I got four or five frames.

If I borrowed someone's studio, there would usually be an assistant there to help out, but I didn't have my own assistants on a regular basis until the magazine I worked for, Rolling Stone, moved its offices from California to New York, in 1977. I didn't hire someone full-time until I had my first studio, in 1981, and I found the new arrangement frustrating. The assistant didn't automatically see what I saw. Everyone sees things differently, and he often didn't know what to do even if he was standing next to me. I had watched Dick Avedon work and I didn't understand why it couldn't be like that. Avedon didn't have to tell his assistant where to move the light. It seemed to be done by osmosis. That came from working together for many years. Reluctantly, I had to learn to talk about the shoot before it happened, which didn't seem right. It took away the mystery.

The job description for an assistant is pretty loose. Over time, assistants have taken on roles I couldn't have envisioned when I started working. My assistants used to check out new equipment and work on lighting problems in the studio. Our last studio was in an old double garage in Chelsea. It was vast, with high ceilings. It was the studio of my dreams, but I realized that I didn't need it. My best pictures are taken on location. Anyway, the studio got too big. We had too much equipment. Things were getting out of hand. Having a studio is a little like having a fancy car. It doesn't help you take better pictures. Now I have an office in a town house in the West Village. The assistants have a room where we keep just enough equipment for a small portrait shoot. There is an area for meetings. My studio manager and the archivists have spaces. Postproduction work on the pictures is done in a design room that has several computer stations. There are a number of fully equipped photo studios in the neighborhood that we can rent. And we can set up a portable studio anywhere if we need to.

Mick Jagger

When I first worked for Rolling Stone, in the early 70s, we wouldn't photograph a band until they came to town. I hardly ever traveled. I took some pictures of the Rolling Stones when they came through San Francisco in 1971 and 1972. Truman Capote was supposed to write a story for the magazine about the 1972 tour, and the editor, Jann Wenner, said it was O.K. if I went along to two or three cities. Robert Frank was traveling with the band, making a 16-mm. film that would become Cocksucker Blues. The band had commissioned him to do it, but it was never formally released, presumably because of the drugs and sex that were filmed. Danny Seymour, Frank's friend and camera assistant, was involved in a lot of that. He died mysteriously while the film was being edited.

I was in awe of Robert Frank. He had been one of my heroes when I was a photography student at the San Francisco Art Institute. I couldn't believe that I was able to watch him work for a few days, that I was actually in the room where Robert Frank was loading his camera. He picked up my camera once. I was terrified. He held it. It was like being with God. He said to me, "You can't get every picture." That was comforting advice. You do miss things. You're attached to this machine. To its timing. Things are moving in front of you and you're supposed to capture them, but it's not always possible. Robert Frank didn't seem to be missing anything, though. He was tireless. He never stopped working.

I guess the band liked the few pictures I took then, and in 1975 Mick called and asked me if I would like to be their tour photographer. Mick is very shrewd. He seems to understand that the documentation of the band is important. He kept all of his costumes from the tours. And he's always had a photographer. Like the president or the Queen has a photographer.

I went to Jann and told him I wanted to go on the tour. He said that he couldn't guarantee that there would be a job for me when I came back, but I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. Robert Frank had photographed the Rolling Stones and now it was my turn.

The band was rehearsing at Andy Warhol's place in Montauk, at the end of Long Island, and I went out there for a month or so, and then there was a break and the tour started in June. I was very naïve. I brought my tennis racket with me. I thought that maybe as we went from city to city I would take tennis lessons. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. They were paying me a few hundred dollars a week and I was supposed to create publicity pictures, but I only managed to get a few out the first day and that was it. I was never up during the day again. I was always with the band.

At the time, I thought that the way to get the best work was to become a chameleon. To become so much a part of what was going on that no one would notice you were there. It was unbelievably stupid of me to pick that situation to become part of. I did everything you're supposed to do when you go on tour with the Rolling Stones. It was the first time in my life that something took me over.

A rock 'n' roll tour is unnatural. You're moving through time and space too fast. The experience is extreme. There is the bigness of the performances and then the isolation and loneliness that follows. The band was like a group of lost boys, but their music saved them. It gave them a reason to exist. When they weren't on tour they didn't spend that much time together. On the road they worked. It was the first time in my life-and I'd been at Rolling Stone for five years by then-that I saw how music is made. I saw how it is produced organically. The riffs I heard in hotel rooms during the tour were the songs on the next album-"Memory Motel," "Fool to Cry."

The photograph that is emblematic of the 1975 tour for me is the one of Mick in the elevator. It was toward the end of the tour, and he was not on the ground. He was flying. From another world. He was the most beautiful object. Like a butterfly. Ethereal. After all the time on the road, his dancing was very loose. It was almost surreal. I was always aware of where Mick was. What might have seemed like a nuisance to him became a source of comfort. To know that I was somewhere nearby. It was a subject-photographer relationship of an obsessive kind. I remember him saying that I should tell him if I wanted him to be at a specific place on the stage at any point in the show, but I found that too daunting. I couldn't think of anything for him to do that he wasn't already doing.

At the end of the performances, the band would do two or three encores that had been planned. Nothing was ad-libbed. They were professional in a way I hadn't seen until then. They'd been doing it awhile. After the last encore, when everyone in the audience thought they were coming onstage again, they would get out of Dodge. Mick dumped several pails of water on his head every night as part of the show and he would leave the stage totally wet, with his eye makeup running. He wrapped himself up in towels and jumped in the car. Usually the band went straight to the plane, but we were staying in town the night I photographed him in the elevator. The picture was taken on the way up to Mick's room. He and I were alone. We were on some level out of it. Not because of drugs, but because of all that travel, and sleep deprivation, and the exertion of the performances.

I learned about power on that tour. About how people in an audience can lose a sense of themselves and melt into a frenzied, mindless mass. Mick and Keith had tremendous power both on and offstage. They would walk into a room like young gods. I found that my proximity to them lent me power also. A new kind of status. It didn't have anything to do with my work. It was power by association.

I've been on many tour buses and at many concerts, but the best photographs I've made of musicians at work were done during that Rolling Stones tour. I probably spent more time on it than on any other subject. For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. You can get amazing work, but you've got to be careful. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

Demi Moore

It's hard to imagine now, but the portrait of Demi Moore nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair was truly scandalous in 1991. Scandalous in the sense of shocking and morally offensive to some people. The first day the issue was available, it sold out on newsstands at Grand Central Station during the morning rush hour. Newsstands in other parts of the country displayed it in a white paper wrapper, as if it were a porn magazine. Several supermarket chains refused to sell it even with the wrapper. Television crews were parked outside the Vanity Fair office for days. Editorialists and pundits weighed in. A few years later, the picture was held responsible for the rise of body-hugging maternity fashions.

None of this was my intention, although it's gratifying to think that the picture helped make pregnant women feel less awkward or embarrassed about their bodies. It began as a shoot with a specific problem. Demi had a new movie coming out, and Tina Brown, who was the editor of the magazine then, wanted to put her on the cover, but Demi was seven months pregnant with her second child. Tina and I talked about how to handle this, and we decided to go for a glamorous, sexy look. Lori Goldstein, the stylist, brought diamond earrings and a 30-carat-diamond ring to the studio in Los Angeles where we were shooting. We had long gowns, including a green satin robe by Isaac Mizrahi.

Demi and I had worked together several times before, and I'd taken her wedding pictures when she married Bruce Willis, in 1987. I had said to her then that I was interested in photographing a pregnant woman, which at that point I never had. Demi called me when she was going to have their first child. Bruce was working on location in Kentucky and she had gone there to have the baby. I stopped off in Kentucky on the way back to New York from Los Angeles and took a few rolls of black-and-white film. Just for them. Demi and Bruce were not shy about documenting the pregnancy. Several friends and a man with three video cameras were in the room when their daughter was born a few weeks later.

At the cover sitting in 1991, I shot a few close-ups and some full-length portraits. Demi was by no means camouflaged for any of them. In the standing portrait published inside the magazine the green satin robe is pulled off her shoulders and it falls open to expose her belly and leg. In another picture she's wearing a black lace bra and panties. But the fully nude picture was not taken until toward the end of the shoot and was intended just for Demi. I was taking some companion photographs to the ones I had made during Demi's first pregnancy. As I was shooting, I said, "You know, this would be a great cover." It wasn't until I got back to New York and looked at the proofs that I realized that there really was a great cover photograph there. Tina agreed, although she thought that Demi would be furious if we ran it. She was surprised when Demi said yes right away. We all knew what we were doing up to a point, but none of us completely understood the ramifications.

A few months after the Demi Moore picture was published, an exhibition of my work from 1970 to 1990 opened at the International Center of Photography, in New York. The director of the center, Cornell Capa, wanted to blow the picture up and hang it in the stairwell. I wouldn't let him. It was a popular picture and it broke ground, but I don't think it's a good photograph per se. It's a magazine cover. If it were a great portrait, she wouldn't be covering her breasts. She wouldn't necessarily be looking at the camera. There are different criteria for magazine covers. They're simple. The addition of type doesn't destroy them. Sometimes they even need type. My best photographs are inside the magazine.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Malibu, California, 1988. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I first worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1975, when he was competing in the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding contest in South Africa. Arnold was 28. He'd already been Mr. Olympia five times and he was about to retire from bodybuilding. He wanted to get into films. The 1975 Mr. Olympia contest was the basis for George Butler's documentary Pumping Iron, the movie that popularized bodybuilding and introduced Arnold to a wider audience. Butler was a friend of Jann Wenner's. I don't remember exactly, but I assume that my trip to South Africa was what is now known as a press junket. I can't imagine that Rolling Stone would have paid for it. I do remember that Butler was always filming when I was trying to work.

Arnold is the center of Pumping Iron in every way. In terms of the narrative of the preparation for the contest, he is the guy everybody else has to beat, which they pretty much know they can't. As a character, he is aggressively, if charmingly, self-confident. Witty. Intelligent. Full of himself. He somehow makes what is a rather freakish scene seem almost normal, although it never seemed normal to me. Steroids were legal then. I had just spent several weeks on tour with the Rolling Stones, where Mick Jagger was the male sexual ideal. Being around all those super-pumped-up guys made me feel like Diane Arbus. It didn't help that we were in South Africa, which still had apartheid. There were separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. It was an uncomfortable situation.

Arnold was sharing a room with his friend Franco Columbu, who came in second in the final posedown. Arnold and Franco were very competitive and brotherly and I decided that I wanted to photograph them in bed. I had in mind something that was, in retrospect, along the lines of Bruce Weber. The magazine used one of the photographs of them horsing around. Standing on their heads on their pillows. It was more silly than erotic. They had their underpants on for that shot, but Arnold was also walking around naked that morning. Like most models or athletes who love their bodies, Arnold didn't mind being naked.

Two years later, when I had to photograph Dolly Parton and needed an interesting background, I asked Arnold to pose with her. She was a much bigger star than he was. Most people had never heard of him then. I was thinking of chopping off his head in the frame, but it became a moot point because Dolly kept standing in front of him and blocking him out of the picture. In the portrait, all you can see of him are his flexed arms and legs. He's furniture.

In Pumping Iron, Arnold says, "I was always dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, being, for thousands of years, remembered." Ten years later he was the Terminator. I shot him for the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame in 1988. We were shooting on the beach, and he said he had a horse, and I said, Well, bring it along, not thinking much about it. I couldn't believe it when the horse showed up. It looked like Arnold. Arnold's thigh in those white pants looks like the horse's thigh. It was not a picture that I liked right away, because it is primarily about form and I'm reluctant to have form impose the meaning on a picture. But in Arnold's case, form is also content.

Elizabeth II, Buckingham Palace, London, March 28, 2007. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

The Queen

In 2007, a few weeks before Queen Elizabeth visited the United States for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, I was asked to take her portrait. I was the first American to be asked by the Palace to make an official portrait of the Queen, which was very flattering. I felt honored. I also felt that because I was an American I had an advantage over every other photographer or painter who had made a portrait of her. It was O.K. for me to be reverent. The British are conflicted about what they think of the monarch. If a British portraitist is reverent, he's perceived to be doting. I could do something traditional.

It's ironic that the sitting with the Queen became controversial. I'm rather proud of having been in control of a complicated shoot. The controversy arose about two months after the pictures were published, when the BBC claimed that the Queen had walked out while we were shooting. This was completely untrue, and although they retracted the claim and issued an apology to the Queen and to me almost immediately, the scandal had a life of its own. The story, which came to be referred to as Queengate, wouldn't die. Eventually the head of BBC One resigned over it.

When I was preparing for the shoot, I thought about using the landscape around Balmoral Castle, in Scotland. I brought this up in the very first conference call with the Palace. I said that Americans thought of the Queen as an outdoorswoman. I had been influenced by Helen Mirren's performance in The Queen and I couldn't help mentioning how much I liked her character in that film. There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

The second idea I had, after Balmoral, was to photograph the Queen on horseback. I asked where she rode and they said she went riding every Saturday at Windsor Castle. I said that I would love to see her in her riding clothes, and in a later conversation I asked if she could stop during her weekend ride and get off her horse and mount it again. That is, could I do a portrait of her in the trees. They said, No, it was not possible. She just rode the horse and came back, and, anyway, she didn't wear riding clothes anymore. A few days later they said it was going to be Buckingham Palace and no horses.

I realized that I was going to need some time on the ground for this. When we arrived in London, we went straight to the palace and were shown all the rooms, including the throne room-everywhere except the private quarters. And then we scouted the back. There was a wintery sky and the trees didn't have leaves. It was an appropriate mood for this moment in the Queen's life. There was no way, however, that she was going to stand outside in formal attire.

For a sitting like this you don't put all your eggs in one basket. You try to have as many options as possible. I kept thinking that somehow I would get the Queen outside, but I began choosing formal outfits. I narrowed the robes down to a very handsome Order of the Garter cape, but then we were told that she could wear only a white dress under it. We were lobbying for a gold dress. I was also hoping for a dress with more body to it. The Queen wears very streamlined dresses now that she's older, and I wanted her in something with more volume. But she didn't have anything like that. Finally everyone agreed that she could wear a gold-and-white dress under the Order of the Garter robe. The Queen was 80 years old. She was sturdy, but putting on and taking off a lot of heavy clothes is tiring, and she had to be dressed in layers to expedite things. The gold-white dress became the base.

I was still upset that I couldn't get her outside. It was so beautiful out there. And it wasn't cold or raining or anything. I began thinking about what Cecil Beaton had done. He brought in flowered backdrops. Beaton was big on backdrops. He made very stagy portraits. Perhaps because the pictures were made in black and white you don't notice the backdrops. They sort of go out of focus. I realized that I could do something similar digitally. I decided to photograph the garden and the trees for a backdrop.

The Palace had given us 25 minutes with the Queen, so there had to be a battle plan. I chose a grand reception room, the White Drawing Room, as the principal setting because of the light from the tall windows. Supplementary lights had been pre-set so that when the Queen moved from one spot to another all we needed to do was switch them on. We had constructed a gray canvas backdrop in an anteroom, and she was to come in there wearing the Order of the Garter robe and the dress, but no tiara. The first shot was to be made on a balcony, with the sky behind her. That sky could be digitally exchanged later for the pictures I had taken in the gardens the day before. I didn't want her to be wearing a tiara in the gardens.

The morning of the shoot, the Queen came walking down the hall very purposefully. She was definitely a force. This was all being taped by the BBC for a documentary. I would never have agreed to their being there if I felt I had any choice, but they had been following her around for months. Their microphone picked up her saying, "I've had enough of dressing like this, thank you very much," as she marched down the hall. Later, when segments of footage for the BBC were edited for a promotional film, it appeared as if the Queen were stomping out of the photo session rather than going into it. Thus the brouhaha.

The Queen was about 20 minutes late, which we thought was a little strange. When that happens, you never know if it can be made up on the other end. My five-year-old daughter, Sarah, had come with us, and she curtsied and offered the Queen flowers, and I introduced my team. At this point I was in shock. The Queen had the tiara on. That was not the plan. It was supposed to be added later. The dresser knew that. The Queen started saying, "I don't have much time. I don't have much time," and I took her to the first setup and showed her the pictures of the gardens. I think she understood what we had in mind. Then I walked her into the drawing room, probably sooner than I would have if things had been going well. She composed herself when I took some pictures.

I knew how tight everything was, especially with the loss of 20 minutes, and I asked the Queen if she would remove the tiara. (I used the word "crown," which was a faux pas.) I suggested that a less dressy look might be better. And she said, "Less dressy! What do you think this is?" I thought she was being funny. English humor. But I noticed that the dresser and everyone else who had been working with her were staying about 20 feet away from her.

We removed the big robe, and I took the picture of the Queen looking out the window, and then I said, Listen, I was a little thrown when you first came in, and I have one more picture I'd like to try, with an admiral's boat cloak. I was thinking of one of Cecil Beaton's last pictures of the Queen. A very stark and simple and strong portrait in which she's wearing a boat cloak. We went back into the anteroom, where the gray canvas backdrop had been set up, and she took off the tiara and put on the cloak. That's the shot we digitally imposed on pictures of the garden.

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Arnold Newman said that photography is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent moving furniture. I think about that sometimes when we're on location and we've moved the set-the stage, the lights, the backdrop, sandbags, fans. And moved them again. And again. I just have to close my eyes to everything that's being done.

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Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. While studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, she took night classes in photography, and in 1970 she began doing work for Rolling Stone magazine. She became Rolling Stone's chief photographer in 1973.

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Annie Leibovitz at her Manhattan studio. "Women: New Portraits" is her most recent project. Credit Credit Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

The photographer returns to her most personal project with new subjects, a new touring exhibition and a new mentor: Gloria Steinem.

Annie Leibovitz at her Manhattan studio. "Women: New Portraits" is her most recent project. Credit Credit Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

On a recent morning at her photography studio in Chelsea, Annie Leibovitz was affectionately discussing with her longtime friend Gloria Steinem a photo shoot they did together.

The statuesque Ms. Leibovitz, her long white hair flowing down her black button-down shirt, recalled pointing to Ms. Steinem's messy desk in the corner of her home last year and saying, "That's your cockpit."

"I think it's important for a young student or writer to see you at work," Ms. Leibovitz had told her.

In the finished portrait, now tacked to the wall, Ms. Steinem, the 82-year-old political activist and women's advocate, is captured lost in thought - or concern - at her computer, surrounded by books and paper, and bathed in the glow of her desk lamp. "It is, of course, the place that means the most to me," Ms. Steinem said, "because it's where I write - and where I'm unable to write."

The intimate picture of Ms. Steinem was the first of dozens of new images of female leaders - in politics, sports, business and culture - that Ms. Leibovitz, 67, began taking last year to update her 1999 project "Women," a book collaboration with her partner of 15 years, Susan Sontag, who died in 2004. "It really resonated," Ms. Leibovitz said, but "the project was never done. "

Image

Seventeen years down the line, with "Women: New Portraits," she is adding to history, with a new mentor, Ms. Steinem; a new generation of viewers to reach; and a new format beyond the printed page. Since January, Ms. Leibovitz has been on a 10-city international tour, appearing not in museums or shopping malls but in historically rich "pop-up" sites where the audience is invited to join her in "talking circles," led by Ms. Steinem. They have focused on issues that range from sexual violence against women in Mexico City to women's experiences in the technology world in San Francisco.

"Talking in groups like that, it brings me to tears that we can do this sort of work within the show," said Ms. Leibovitz, who added that the new work is more "democratic" - more personal, more satisfying, more concerned with what someone does (like Andréa Medina Rosas, a human rights lawyer working with women on the United States-Mexico border) rather than how they look.

"And being there with Gloria and talking in groups like that," she said. "God, is it possible it could be like this? I like this life."

"We were looking hard in 1999 for women C.E.O.s and women who ran companies - we shot Carly Fiorina," Ms. Leibovitz said, comparing the two projects. "Now, it seems that there really are many more women in high positions. It seemed like issues were more in the forefront."

There is nary a nude among the rows of portraits pinned to the studio wall behind her, sponsored by a carte blanche commission, valued in the millions of dollars, from UBS, the financial services company - though one could hardly imagine asking the singer Adele at her piano, the television producer Shonda Rhimes on set, the Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai in a classroom, the primatologist Jane Goodall, or the senator Elizabeth Warren to disrobe. Caitlyn Jenner is the most scantily clad of the group.

Revisiting the 1999 project, she said: "I wanted to see Gloria Steinem older. I wanted Misty Copeland, the first black prima ballerina of a company that's been in existence for 75 years." And no one knew Lena Dunham. Ms. Leibovitz is working hard to get a few minutes alone with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who doesn't like to be photographed, before the show's opening on Oct. 14 in Frankfurt.

"When you're a photographer, you work in a vacuum," Ms. Leibovitz said. "You take a picture, it gets published. You don't really hear from people. This kind of thing, where you get to see people looking, it makes me want to do more of it and be more engaged like that."

On Nov. 18, the exhibition will open in New York in the gymnasium of the old Bayview Correctional Facility, a former women's prison on West 20th Street and 11th Avenue that closed after damage from Hurricane Sandy. After the exhibition finishes there on Dec. 11, Deborah Berke Partners and the NoVo Foundation will begin transforming the Art Deco structure into the Women's Building, a future hub for women's groups and services. When it opens in 2020, its forlorn cells will be gone and its terra-cotta facade and colorful wall mosaics restored.

"It's a harmonic convergence," Ms. Steinem said of the alignment between the empowering message of the exhibition and how the building is being reimagined.

Their relationship began during the throes of Ms. Leibovitz's work at Vanity Fair, for which she famously shot Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk. (A prolific researcher, Ms. Leibovitz was referencing one of the comedian's stage personas - that of a black girl who uses bleach to scrub her skin in an attempt to look white.)

Ms. Sontag encouraged her to tackle a complicated and personal series. "I knew that if I was going to be involved with Susan Sontag, I was going to have to be better - be a better photographer, be a better person," Ms. Leibovitz said. She used as her template the photographer August Sander's concept of documenting "all walks of life" and went out to find schoolteachers, astronauts, Supreme Court justices, farmers, socialites, prostitutes, the first lady, coal miners, athletes.

The book defied the tradition, Ms. Sontag wrote, of photographing women for their beauty rather than their character. The new project advances this idea. "The imagery of women has to catch up with the imagery of men," Ms. Leibovitz said. "I don't know if I ever succeeded for Susan on some level, which is why it is quite beautiful to go back into this project."

The New York exhibition will introduce Ms. Leibovitz's new portrait of Serena and Venus Williams, shot in September after Serena's unexpected defeat in the semifinals of the United States Open and the loss of her No. 1 ranking. In the portrait, the sisters are locked in an embrace, with the older, taller Venus like a protective wrapper around a more vulnerable-looking Serena.

"It was a tough shoot," Ms. Leibovitz said. "It's a real thing how they take care of each other and hold each other up." After Venus lost to Serena in last year's United States Open, Ms. Leibovitz was inspired by a full-page picture in The Times of the sisters hugging that she ripped it from the paper and stuck on her refrigerator for her three adolescent daughters - Sarah, born in 2001, and the twins Susan and Samuelle, in 2005. "I said, 'They are sisters.'" She worked for a year to schedule the last shoot.

"A sitting is very psychological," said Ms. Leibovitz, who spent a day in Virginia with the photographer Sally Mann, by the river where Ms. Mann had photographed her own children. "Because she's a photographer, she knows what you want, or wish you could have, and there was a kind of resistance initially to giving that. Then, partway through, there was a moment - you could almost see it happen. She gave me those pictures."

Yet Ms. Leibovitz was clearly uncomfortable with the reversal of roles when a photographer arrived at her Chelsea studio to shoot her and Ms. Steinem. Ms. Leibovitz interrogated the man on how he positioned them, the angle he was shooting from, and his choice of lighting, at one point leaping up to inspect how it looked on the screen at the rear of his camera. "I can't help myself, I'm sorry," she said. "I'm such a control freak." (She later invited him back for another photo session.)

Ms. Leibovitz has kept a tight rein artistically but not always business-wise. She faced well-publicized financial problems in 2009 after taking ill-advised loans of millions of dollars and using her homes and rights to her photographs as collateral. She has spoken of the many stresses she faced, from existing mortgages on her homes to federal and state tax liens, to lawsuits, to expenses associated with the deaths of Ms. Sontag and her own parents, and the birth of three children.

"I kept waiting for a knight in armor to come save the day, but the only answer to it was just for me to work hard," Ms. Leibovitz said recently. She refinanced the loans in 2010 and said she repaid the outstanding balances by 2011. (In 2014, she sold her West Village townhouse complex for $28.5 million and "downsized" to an $11 million apartment on the Upper West Side.)

"It's always a kind of tortuous thing between art and commerce - how we make a living," she said. She calls assignment work for magazines "a great highway," even if the pictures that get published aren't always her favorites.

Her association with UBS began in 2014, when she was hired to shoot an advertising campaign. When UBS asked if there was something she was interested in doing for herself, she proposed the series of new women portraits. "It harkens back to being commissioned in the Renaissance," she said.

The bank agreed to her fee but would not discuss details.

According to Johan Jervoe, the chief marketing officer at UBS, it has made the exhibitions free for the public and sponsored educational programs and workshops for art students with Ms. Leibovitz at each space. UBS gets a set of prints at the end to add to its corporate collection of 35,000 artworks and the association of Ms. Leibovitz's high-profile tour to burnish its brand.

"This is a dream assignment for me," Ms. Leibovitz said. "Not enough people talk about how great it is to get older and some of the cool stuff you get to do."

That can mean jumping into the pool, as she did recently to photograph the Olympic swimming champion Katie Ledecky underwater, pushing off from the side as though in a trance. Ms. Leibovitz is confident she will be photographing Hillary Clinton in the White House. "This is her time," she said.

When will she consider the project complete? "Susan herself said this was always a work in progress," Ms. Leibovitz said. "Women are a work in progress. To my dying day, I'll be doing these photographs."

"Women: New Portraits" will be on view in Frankfurt from Oct. 14 to Nov. 6, and in New York from Nov. 18 to Dec. 11 at the Bayview Correctional Facility, 550 West 20th Street. More information available here.

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Annie Leibovitz's Work on 'Women' Is Never Done

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The photographer returns to her most personal project with new subjects, a new touring exhibition and a new mentor: Gloria Steinem. Annie Leibovitz at her Manhattan studio. "Women: New Portraits" is her most recent project.

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Annie Leibovitz is a celebrated American photographer best known for her engaging and dramatic celebrity portraits. Adept at capturing her subject's personality and inner life, her images reflect intimate or staged moments that reveal the playful and expressive aspects of her sitters, as seen in her Disney Dream Portraits (2011). "I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity," she once said. "Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we're really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures." Born on October 2, 1949 in Waterbury, CT, the artist studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute with the intention of becoming an art teacher, and took night classes in photography. In 1970, she began working as a commercial photographer at Rolling Stone magazine, and soon became the first woman to be named chief photographer. She left the publication and began working at Vanity Fair where she developed her style of staged and brightly lit portraits, and today, still regularly contributes to the magazine, as well as to Vogue. She has cited both Richard Avedon and Henri-Cartier Bresson as influences to her work, as well as taking photos during her family vacations as a child. Leibovitz is known for her celebrity portraits, and she famously captured the last image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono before his death in 1980. In 1991, she became the first woman ever to have a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2008, the photographer authored and published the book Annie Leibovitz at Work, which dissects in detail how some of her most iconic images came to be. The artist's photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Leibovitz currently lives and works in New York, NY.

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Annie Leibovitz is a celebrated American photographer best known for her engaging and dramatic celebrity portraits. View Annie Leibovitz's 827 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. See available photographs, prints and multiples, and design for sale and learn about the artist.