Best known for her bold, colorful photographs for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, Annie Leibovitz is "the portraitist of the rock generation," wrote Mary Ann Tighe in the Washington Post Book World. Her famous subjects have ranged from rock legend Chuck Berry to former U.S. President Richard Nixon. Often her portraits capture the essence of her subjects' images or dig beneath the veneer of fame to reveal unexpected vulnerability. Some pictures, notably nudes such as her 1991 Vanity Fair cover shot of pregnant actress Demi Moore, have sparked controversy. Leibovitz's subjects have appeared smeared with mud or covered with roses, naked or swathed in yards of cloth, impeccably made-up or wildly disheveled. Through hundreds of attention-getting images, Leibovitz "has helped define the nature of stardom in a star-struck age," asserted Charles Hagen in ARTnews.

When she entered the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967, Leibovitz had no plans...