This revelatory volume began as a request from Benedikt Taschen to legendary portrait photographer Annie Leibowitz: to amass her work into an epic and comprehensive collection. Intrigued, Leibowitz accepted the challenge and this resulting project took several years to develop. To create this volume, 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. 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. Annie Leibovitz is often imitated, particularly by younger photographers, but her work is somehow immediately recognizable. Her pictures are at once intimate and iconic, stylistically wide-ranging and also uniquely singular.