When Benedikt Taschen asked the most important portrait photographer working today to collect her pictures in a SUMO-sized book, she was intrigued and challenged. The project took several years to develop and proved to be revelatory. Annie Leibovitz drew from over 40 years of work, starting with the viscerally intimate reportage she created for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s and extending through the more stylized portraiture of her work for Vanity Fair and Vogue. Celebrated images such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono entwined in a last embrace are printed alongside portraits that have rarely, and sometimes never before, been seen. Annie Leibovitz was able to present some of her famous group portraits in a format that proves that she is the master of the genre. Her pictures are at once intimate and iconic, wide-ranging stylistically and also uniquely hers. Annie Leibovitz is often imitated, particularly by younger photographers, but her work is somehow immediately recognizable.

The bookends of the Leibovitz collection are the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974 and the formal color portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007. In between are portraits that make up a family album of our time: actors, dancers, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, performance artists, journalists, athletes, businesspeople. Performance and power are recurring themes. A supplementary book contains essays by Annie Leibovitz, Graydon Carter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Paul Roth and short texts describing the subjects of each of the over 250 photographs.

The Collector’s Edition is available in four different covers:
* Whoopi Goldberg, Berkeley, California, 1984
* Keith Haring, New York City, 1986
* David Byrne, Los Angeles, 1986
* Patti Smith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1978

Limited to a total of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, this book is available as Collector’s Edition (No. 1,001–10,000) and also as an Art Edition (No. 1–1,000) with a fine art print, signed by Annie Leibovitz, and the full set of all four covers. Both editions come with a tripod book stand designed by Marc Newson.

The designer of the bookstand: Born in Sydney, Australia, Marc Newson studied jewelry and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts before moving to Tokyo and Paris. Now living and working in the UK, Newson has become one of the world’s most accomplished designers. He has forged innovative partnerships with brands such as Louis Vuitton, Ferrari and Apple. He is the only designer represented by Gagosian, and his work is present in the collection of over 40 museums worldwide.

The photographer: Annie Leibovitz is one of the most influential photographers of our time. She began working as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970 while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. By 1983, when she left Rolling Stone for the revived Vanity Fair, she was already closely identified with the conceptual, theatrical style that is her hallmark. In subsequent decades, at Vanity Fair and Vogue and in independent projects, she has worked across many photographic genres and developed a large body of work—portraits of actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and political and business figures, as well as fashion photographs—that expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life. She has published several books and has exhibited widely. She is a Commandeur in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the U.S. Library of Congress.

The authors: 
* Graydon Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017.
* Hans Ulrich Obrist is the Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first exhibition World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows and has published extensively on art, architecture, and culture. In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence.
* Paul Roth is the director of the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto.
* Steve Martin is an award-winning comedian, actor, writer, producer, and musician.