In 2007, Buckingham Palace commissioned Annie Leibovitz to photograph Queen Elizabeth. Leibovitz became the first American photographer to make an official portrait of the Queen. After the sitting, the photographer asked why her royal subject had picked her for the portrait. “Because you asked,” The queen replied.
It was at that point that Leibovitz remembered that ten years earlier she had asked to make the Queen’s portrait.
“I was selecting subjects for the first volume of Women. We were casting a wide net in the beginning, until Susan Sontag said that it was too wide. She said that I should stick with what I know. It became a book of portraits of American women,” Annie writes in our new two volume book
Annie Leibovitz Women: 2025 Edition.
In this two-volume collection of portraits, the legendary photographer presents a powerful celebration of women in all of their diversities. Beautifully presented in an elegant grey slipcase, these highly personal books offer an extraordinary 30-plus-year retrospective of Leibovitz’s portraits of women. Stunning photographs – in both color and black and white – represent an international who’s who of women effecting positive change in the world, from Louise Bourgeois, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Taylor, and Eudora Welty to Joan Baez, Billie Eilish, Serena and Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour.
Rihanna, musician, entrepreneur, Ritz Hotel, Paris, 2022. © Annie Leibovitz
Oprah says on OprahDaily.com: “I remember sitting on that porch in Mississippi when she photographed me. [This is} a two-book set for anyone who treasures powerful images, and the stories women carry.”
Dwana Smallwood, dancer, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York City, 2007. © Annie Leibovitz. Judith Jamison, dancer, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York City, 1993. © Annie Leibovitz
“That first volume of Women is very focused,” Leibovitz writes in the new book. “It was a project that we thought about and took several years to complete. I was inspired by August Sanders’ portraits of people in all walks of life. The effect of the photographs—the modern imagery of women—seen together surprised us all; it was illuminating. Karen Finley, the performance artist in the first volume, showed the book to her eight-year-old daughter, Violet. After looking through the book, Violet said to her mother, “Mommy when I grow up, I want to be a woman.”
Louise Bourgeois, sculptor, New York City, 1997. © Annie Leibovitz
“Most of the photographs were selected from work I did in the twenty-five years since the publication of volume one,” Leibovitz says about the second volume in our new edition. “For this volume I thought about issues that are important today. But the portraits were usually selected because I like the pictures or admire the people or both. There are many artists. Too many? Perhaps. But, as Susan Sontag wrote in her introduction to volume one, this is an ongoing story.”
As well as over 250 portraits, spanning 30 years, the book features written contributions from Susan Sontag, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Gloria Steinem, who writes:
Gloria Steinem, journalist, women’s rights activist, New York City, 2015. © Annie Leibovitz
“Looking at Annie’s book, Women, from twenty-five years ago, I see women represented in all of their diversities. Many project strength in those images, but it didn’t mean that came to them naturally. Her subjects didn’t always have easy or comfortable lives, but they did share a common theme of using even their weakest moments to turn their lives around."
"Those brave, bold women were still exceptions in our society and Annie’s attention legitimized them. This was especially true of women trying to inhabit industries that had been defined by masculinity: for instance, sports and politics. For myself, I spent too many years being the “only” girl reporter. My male colleagues were always supportive, but they also treated me like an exception. The images show women negotiating with a world that didn’t quite value femaleness.”
Susan McNamara, showgirl, Bally’s Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1995. © Annie Leibovitz
For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who contributes an essay to the second volume, the book “signals a double perception of what the world is and what it ought to be."
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writer, Columbia, Maryland, 2024. © Annie Leibovitz
"The point being made in this collection of photographs is more imaginative than rhetorical. Because the images are so strikingly attentive to aesthetic and to pleasure, what I see is not so much an absence of rhetoric as an intrinsic lack of indebtedness to the very idea of rhetoric."
