Annie Leibovitz
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. 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.
If you own a work by Annie Leibovitz
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 costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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