Annie Leibovitz
Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer whose style is marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Leibovitz is the third of six children in a Jewish family. Her mother was a modern dance instructor, while her father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. The family moved frequently with her father's duty assignments, and she took her first pictures when he was stationed in the Philippines.
In high school, she became interested in various artistic endeavours, and began to write and play music. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute. She became interested in photography after taking pictures when she lived in the Philippines, where her Air Force father was stationed during the Vietnam War. For several years, she continued to develop her photography skills while she worked various jobs, including a stint on a kibbutz Amir in Israel for several months in 1969.
When Leibovitz returned to America in 1970, she worked for the recently launched Rolling Stone magazine. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of Rolling Stone. Leibovitz worked for the magazine until 1983, and her intimate photographs of celebrities helped define the Rolling Stone look.
In 1975, Leibovitz served as a concert-tour photographer for The Rolling Stones' Tour of the Americas.
Since 1983, Leibovitz has worked as a featured portrait photographer for Vanity Fair.
Leibovitz sued Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement of her Vanity Fair cover photograph of a pregnant Demi Moore from a 1991 issue titled "More Demi Moore." Paramount had commissioned a parody photograph of Leslie Nielsen, pregnant, for use in a promotional poster for the 1994 comedy Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. The case, Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp., has become an important fair use case in U.S. copyright law. At trial, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York found that Paramount's use of the photo constituted fair use because parodies were likely to generate little or no licensing revenue. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed.
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.”
“If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.”
“Abraham helped build their cabin and split rails for a fence, but he soon left home for good. The log cabin near Decatur was, I learned, the one that went on tour after the assassination. It was dismantled by John Hanks, Lincoln's second cousin, and taken to Chicago and then to Boston. The last sighting of it, as least as far as we can ascertain, was at P.T. Barnum's museum in New York. It was apparently lost at sea while being shipped to England.”