Ten of Annie Leibovitz’s Best-Known Photos

Not many photographers emerge from behind the camera to become as famous as the celebrities they’ve photographed. Annie Leibovitz is different. Her intimate, daring, and revealing portraits capture an element of vulnerability and a rarely seen peak behind the celeb façade that has helped the former Rolling Stone magazine photographer to shape the style of pop culture for the past 50 years.

“I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. 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.”

Annie Leibovitz

What started out as a staff photographer job for Rolling Stone has seen Leibovitz mould celebrity photography in her own image. From being promoted to the position of chief photographer at Rolling Stone after only two years, to being declared a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, becoming the first woman to have a feature exhibition at the US National Portrait Gallery, and taking the last ever photo of John Lennon just hours before he died, Leibovitz is as important as her work.

A master at capturing a sitter’s personality, Leibovitz’s work transcends the usual showbiz façade to reveal intimate moments of tenderness, vulnerability, and unseen personalities. Taking in some of the world’s most famous faces, there aren’t many celebrities that Leibovitz hasn’t had pose for her, but with a treasure trove of an archive, it’s certain that one of her intimate, playful, or even controversial photos will strike a chord.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono (1980)

At approximately 5pm on 8 December 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed outside Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Just hours before, Annie Leibovitz photographed Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono in a bold and striking portrait that took on a powerful poignancy following the former Beatle’s murder.

It was the last professional photo ever taken of John Lennon and showcases the couple’s relationship, with the naked and vulnerable Lennon clinging to the assured (and clothed) Ono. “It’s actually an excellent example of how circumstances change a picture,” said Leibovitz. “Suddenly, that photograph has a story. You’re looking at it and thinking it’s their last kiss, or they’re saying goodbye.” In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors voted the image the best magazine cover of the past 40 years.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (1975)

In her role as chief photographer for Rolling Stone, Leibowitz influenced the style of music photography throughout the 1970s, which is evident in her work as photographer for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas ’75.  

She captured rock’n’roll excess, excitement, and exhaustion, but her gentle portrait of Jagger and Richards shows the softer side of two skinny English boys who had become music giants. “I remember Mick and Keith both saying, ‘Hmmm, we actually like that photo’ – like they were almost surprised,” recalls Leibovitz of Jagger and Richards’ reaction to the photo. “She was a casual, good-humored photographer,” Jagger said. “She could go anywhere she wanted.”

Miley Cyrus (2008)

Miley Cyrus was 15 years old when Leibovitz photographed the homespun, girl-next-door Disney star for Vanity Fair in a controversial shoot. It featured the wholesome teenage starlet wrapped in a satin bed sheet with her back exposed, which some considered suggestive of nudity.   

In the wake of the resulting uproar, Leibovitz and Vanity Fair defended their work in a joint statement, “I’m sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted. Miley and I looked at fashion photographs together and we discussed the picture in that context before we shot it. The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful.”

Demi Moore (1991)

For the cover of Vanity Fair in August 1991, Leibovitz had been asked to conceal the young Demi Moore’s seven-month-pregnant figure and shoot a tightly cropped portrait of her face. Instead, Leibovitz produced one of the most discussed magazine covers in history when she asked Moore to disrobe for an altogether more personal portrait.

Despite the positive reception the portrait received, Leibovitz remains sceptical of its quality. “It was a popular picture and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se,” she said in 2012. “If it were a great portrait, she wouldn’t be covering her breasts. She wouldn’t necessarily be looking at the camera.”

Queen Elizabeth II (2007)

Leibovitz again broke new ground when she became the first American to produce an official portrait of The Queen to celebrate Her Majesty’s State Visit to the United States in 2007. Influenced by the atmospheric royal portraits of Cecil Beaton, Leibovitz took a series of photographs, including one of The Queen in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, which combines modern techniques with a sense of tradition.

“I felt honored,” said Leibovitz. “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 OK for me to be reverent”.

Whoopi Goldberg (1984)

Mentioned in the same breath as Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce for her raw, racially charged routines, Whoopi Goldberg was an up-and-coming comedian in 1984 who had joked about using Chlorox in an attempt to bleach her skin in her routine.

So, when Leibovitz suggested using a bath full of milk for the portrait to make a deliberate and powerful comment on race, the scene was set for a serious image destined to make a political impact. A lightness was accidentally added though when Goldberg slipped getting into the bath. “And I went, oh, my goodness, this is graphically amazing and interesting,” said Leibovitz.

Gisele Bundchen and LeBron James, 2008

Shot for the April 2008 cover of Vogue, Leibovitz utilized visual references from the famous 1933 King Kong film with James as the title character and Bundchen in a silk gown as Fay Wray.

Leibovitz again courted controversy though when it was suggested that she was leaning on racial stereotypes in the image, although others have said it was a clever subversion of those tropes. Leibovitz has never commented. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1988)

Snapped for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1990, the image of the confident cigar smoking Arnie atop his own horse remained an outtake from the shoot until it resurfaced in the March 2003 issue of the magazine.

The future governor of California was at the height of his Terminator fame and comfortable in the presence of Leibovitz’s camera, having already been shot by the photographer at the Mr Olympia contest in South Africa, 1975.

Keith Haring (1986)

Completely immersing herself in the style of her sitter, Leibovitz’s portrait of New York artist Keith Haring embodies the pop art graffiti aesthetic of the late artist’s work, while still maintaining that typical Leibovitz characteristic of revealing the sitter’s personality. And in this case a little more was also revealed.  

“We shot it in the studio, on a set constructed to look like someone’s living room, then painted it white,” explained Leibovitz in an interview. “When Keith arrived he painted the room with black lines in less than forty-five minutes. Then he painted his upper body in about five minutes. When he came out of the dressing room he was wearing white painters’ pants, but it just seemed obvious to both of us at that point that he should paint the rest of him.”

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon 1995

“Nobody’s perfect,” replies Osgood with an accepting shrug when his fiancée Josephine (played by Jack Lemmon) reveals she’s a man in the final scene of the 1959 film Some Like It Hot. 

This indifference to gender identity was again playfully explored by Leibovitz 36 years later in a portrait that subverted expectations of a Hollywood star, as the pair hold hands in their character’s underwear. Reprising their roles from the hit film, Curtis stands proud, while Lemmon remains a little belligerent in an expressive photograph that’s guaranteed to raise a smile.