Nov. 9 Wexner Center Event: A Conversation between Renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz and Rolling Stone founder, publisher and editor Jann S. Wenner

Annie Leibovitz began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. By 1983, when she joined the staff of the revived Vanity Fair, she was established as the foremost rock music photographer and an astute documentarian of the social landscape.

Annie Leibovitz was Rolling Stone's Chief Photographer, during the period when Ben Fong-Torres, our longtime columist on these pages was the senior music editor and writer for Rolling Stone. 

At Vanity Fair, and later at Vogue, she developed a large body of work that expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life.

Scarlett Johanssen, Los Angeles, 2004. © Annie Leibovitz

She has photographed U.S. presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama as well as hundreds of athletes, actors, artists, dancers, musicians, fashion designers, scientists, and business leaders. She has also created several influential advertising campaigns, including her award-winning portraits for American Express and the Gap.

By no means are all of Leibovitz’s subjects famous. In the special projects that became books on “women” and “music,” she brought her approach to portraiture to figures who might not necessarily be featured in a magazine.

She has spent significant amounts of time on stories that were not an assignment: the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, for instance, and the formation of the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

She was the official photographer of the World Cup Games in Mexico in 1986 and of the summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. She made a series of portraits of people living with AIDS in San Francisco, worked with the Nature Conservancy on a sequence of landscapes of wilderness areas, and documented the construction of Renzo Piano’s New York Times building.

Several collections of Leibovitz’s work have been published. They include Annie Leibovitz: Photographs (1983); Annie Leibovitz: Photographs 1970–1990 (1991); Olympic Portraits (1996); Women (1999), in collaboration with Susan Sontag; American Music (2003); A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 (2006); Annie Leibovitz at Work (2008), a first-person commentary on her career; and Pilgrimage (2011).

Exhibitions of Leibovitz’s work have appeared at museums and galleries all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; the National Portrait Gallery in London; the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.