Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz has become nearly as famous as the celebrities she photographs, said Jordan Riefe in The Guardian (U.K.). Leibovitz, 69, trained her eye as a photojournalist at Rolling Stone in the 1970s, where she captured some of the decade’s defining moments, such as President Richard Nixon leaving the White House for the last time in a helicopter. By the early 1980s she moved into the studio, creating the stylistic portraits that have become her trademark, such as her iconic Vanity Fair cover of a pregnant Demi Moore wearing nothing but a diamond ring. Her image of a naked John Lennon curling up to a fully clothed Yoko Ono was the last picture ever taken of the former Beatle. “I kind of know what people kind of want to look like,” Leibovitz says. “I really like to please. This is their life and I like to let them get to wherever the next step is they want to get to.” That’s easier with some celebrities than others. “People like Johnny Depp or Nicole Kidman—I went kicking and screaming to this idea that there actually were people who the camera did love,” she says. “I refused to believe that at first. I had to come to terms with the fact that there are photogenic people.”