Annie Leibovitz valuation
Half a century of portraits for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue, staged as carefully as a film set.
Annie Leibovitz was born at Waterbury in Connecticut in 1949, studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, and began working for Rolling Stone in 1970, becoming its chief photographer within three years.
What a work by Annie Leibovitz is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Annie Leibovitz was born at Waterbury in Connecticut in 1949, studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, and began working for Rolling Stone in 1970, becoming its chief photographer within three years. She photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the magazine on the day Lennon was killed in December 1980. In 1983 she moved to Vanity Fair, where covers such as Demi Moore pregnant and Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk made the staged, lit, conceptual celebrity portrait her signature, and she has worked for Vogue since the late 1990s. She photographed Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 and again in 2016. With Susan Sontag, her partner, she made the book Women, and A Photographer's Life set personal and commissioned work side by side.
The first thing to establish is what kind of print it is. Leibovitz has issued fine-art prints in numbered editions through her galleries, usually chromogenic or pigment prints signed on the verso or a label, and those are distinct from magazine proofs, promotional prints and the signed prints made for charity sales or alongside books, which can look much the same on a wall. Edition number, size, date of printing and the certificate or gallery label identify the work. Much of the work is large colour photography, so fading, surface marks and damage from framing are the usual condition issues. The studio and her galleries are the reference for edition details.
The Rolling Stones and the National Portrait Gallery
Leibovitz switched from painting to photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, drawn by the work of Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson, and was the Rolling Stones' tour photographer for their Tour of the Americas in 1975. In 1991 she showed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the first woman and the second living portraitist to do so, and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 became a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. Pilgrimage, published in 2011, was shown at the New-York Historical Society, and WOMEN: New Portraits, commissioned by UBS, travelled to ten cities in 2016 and 2017.
The Chrysler Building, Pirelli and At Work
Her advertising work for American Express won a Clio in 1987, and in 1994 she photographed the sprinter Carl Lewis crouched on the blocks in red stilettos for Pirelli. In 1991, after Margaret Bourke-White, she climbed onto one of the eagle gargoyles on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building to photograph the dancer David Parsons on another. She shot the Pirelli calendar in 2000 and again for 2016, when she replaced its pin-ups with portraits of women including Serena Williams, Patti Smith and Amy Schumer.
The Brooklyn retrospective went on to seven venues, among them the Corcoran in Washington and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and Fotografiska in Stockholm opened in 2010 with A Photographer's Life. Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles showed The Early Years, 1970-1983 in 2019, and Crystal Bridges hung more than 300 pictures from five decades in Annie Leibovitz at Work in 2023 and 2024. The Library of Congress has named her a Living Legend.
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