From her first assignments for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s to her defining images of celebrity found in Vanity Fair since 1983, Annie Liebovitz has changed the way Americans see the twentieth century. Capturing both the glamorous and the banal sides of celebrity, she has also transformed the way other photographers have captured the twentieth century on film. For three decades, Liebovitz has crafted an image of the twentieth century as the American century, indelibly marked by a fascination with celebrity.

Liebovitz purchased her first camera while studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960s. Early on, family photographs—her own and others—were strong influences on her work. The power of the camera to encapsulate and communicate family histories drew her to documentary photography and to the work of, among others, the great American photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Robert...