Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on October 2, 1949, Anna-Lou Leibovitz is the third of six children of Marilyn Edith (née Heit) and Samuel Leibovitz. She is a third-generation American. Her father was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force of Romanian Jewish heritage and her mother was a modern dance instructor of Estonian-Jewish heritage. The family moved frequently with her father’s duty assignments, and she took her first pictures when he was stationed in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. Leibovitz’s passion for art was born out of her mother’s engagement with dance, music, and painting.

Leibovitz attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied painting with the intention of becoming an art teacher. At school, she had her first photography workshop and changed her major to photography. She was inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. For several years, she continued to develop her photography skills while holding various jobs, including a stint on a kibbutz in Amir, Israel, for several months in 1969.

When Leibovitz returned to the United States in 1970, she started her career as staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of Rolling Stone, a job she would hold for 10 years. Leibovitz worked for the magazine until 1983, and her intimate photographs of celebrities helped define the Rolling Stone look.

Leibovitz photographed the Rolling Stones in San Francisco in 1971 and 1972, and served as the concert-tour photographer for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas ’75. Her favorite photo from the tour was a photo of Mick Jagger in an elevator.

On December 8, 1980, Leibovitz had a photo shoot with John Lennon for Rolling Stone, and she promised him he would make the cover. She had initially tried to get a picture with just Lennon alone, as Rolling Stone wanted, but Lennon insisted that both he and Yoko Ono be on the cover. Leibovitz then tried to re-create something like the kissing scene from the couple’s Double Fantasy 1980 album cover, a picture Leibovitz loved. She had John remove his clothes and curl up next to Yoko on the floor. Leibovitz recalls,

Leibovitz’s new style of lighting and use of bold colors and poses got her a position with Vanity Fair magazine in 1983.

Leibovitz photographed celebrities for an international advertising campaign for American Express charge cards, which won a Clio award in 1987.

In 1991, Leibovitz mounted an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. She was the second living portraitist and first woman to show there. That same year, Leibovitz was also made Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Also in 1991, Leibovitz emulated Margaret Bourke-White’s feat by mounting one of the eagle gargoyles on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, where she photographed the dancer David Parsons cavorting on another eagle gargoyle. Noted Life photographer and picture editor John Loengard made a gripping photo of Leibovitz at the climax of her danger (Loengard was photographing Leibovitz for The New York Times that day).

Leibovitz has three daughters. Her first, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz was born in October 2001 when Leibovitz was 52 years old. Twin girls Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother in May 2005.

The Greenwich Village properties, at 755–757 Greenwich Street, are part of the Greenwich Village Historic District, and thus the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission must review and approve any work done to the buildings. However, work initiated on the buildings in October 2002, without a permit, began a chain of destruction of those buildings and the neighbor’s at 311 W 11th Street. Due to pressure from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and other groups, the buildings were finally stabilized, though the preservation group criticized the eventual repairs as shoddy and historically insensitive.

Leibovitz had a close relationship with writer and essayist Susan Sontag from 1989 until Sontag’s death in 2004. During Sontag’s lifetime, neither woman publicly disclosed whether the relationship was a platonic friendship or romantic. In 2006, Newsweek magazine made reference to Leibovitz’s decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating, “The two first met in the late ’80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other’s.” When Leibovitz was interviewed for her autobiography A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005, she said that the book told a number of stories, and “with Susan, it was a love story.” While The New York Times in 2009 referred to Sontag as Leibovitz’s “companion”, Leibovitz wrote in A Photographer’s Life: “words like ‘companion’ and ‘partner’ were not in our vocabulary. We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still ‘friend’.” That same year, Leibovitz said the descriptor “lover” was accurate. She later reiterated: “Call us ‘lovers’. I like ‘lovers.’ You know, ‘lovers’ sounds romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love Susan.”

In 2007, a major retrospective of Leibovitz’s work was held at the Brooklyn Museum. The retrospective was based on her book, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 and included many of her professional (celebrity) photographs and numerous personal photographs of her family, children, and partner Susan Sontag. This show, which was expanded to include three official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, then went on the road for seven stops. It was on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from October 2007 to January 2008 and at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco from March 2008 to May 2008. In February 2009, the exhibition was moved to Berlin, Germany. The show included 200 photographs. This exhibition and her talk focused on her personal photographs and life.

In 2007, the BBC misrepresented Leibovitz’s portrait shooting of Queen Elizabeth II to take the Queen’s official picture for her state visit to Virginia. This was filmed for the BBC documentary A Year with the Queen. A promotional trailer for the film showed the Queen reacting angrily to Leibovitz’s suggestion (“less dressy”) that she remove her tiara, then a scene of the Queen walking down a corridor, telling an aide “I’m not changing anything. I’ve had enough dressing like this, thank you very much.” The BBC later apologized and admitted that the sequence of events had been misrepresented, as the Queen was in fact walking to the sitting in the second scene. This led to a BBC scandal and a shake-up of ethics training. However a 2015 London Times article contradicts this story. It stated that the Queen was both incredulous at being asked to remove her crown as “no-one tells her what to do” and insulted as the item was only a tiara.

On April 25, 2008, Entertainment Tonight reported that 15-year-old Miley Cyrus had posed topless for a photo shoot with Vanity Fair. The photograph and subsequently released behind-the-scenes photographs show Cyrus topless, her bare back exposed but her front covered with a bedsheet. The photo was taken by Leibovitz. The full photograph was published with an accompanying story on The New York Times’ website on April 27, 2008. On April 29, 2008, The New York Times clarified: though the pictures left an impression that she was bare-breasted, Cyrus was wrapped in a bedsheet and was actually not topless. Some parents expressed outrage at the nature of the photograph, which a Disney spokesperson described as “a situation [that] was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines”. In response to the Internet circulation of the photo and ensuing media attention, Cyrus released a statement of apology on April 27: “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” Leibovitz also released a statement saying: “I’m sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted…. The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful.”

The photograph was subsequently re-created in 2009 by John and Yoko’s son Sean Lennon posing with his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl, with male/female roles reversed (Sean clothed, Kemp naked), and by Henry Bond and Sam Taylor-Wood in their YBA pastiche October 26, 1993.

In February 2009, Leibovitz borrowed US$15.5 million, after having experienced financial challenges, putting up several houses as well as the rights to all of her photographs as collateral. The New York Times noted that “one of the world’s most successful photographers essentially pawned every snap of the shutter she had made or will make until the loans are paid off”, and that, despite a US$50 million archive, Leibovitz had a “long history of less than careful financial dealings” and “a recent series of personal issues” including the loss of her parents and the 2004 death of Sontag, as well as the addition of two children to her family, and controversial renovation of three Greenwich Village properties.

In July 2009, the Art Capital Group filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Leibovitz for US$24 million regarding repayment of these loans. In a follow-up article from September 5, 2009, an Associated Press story quoted legal experts as saying that filing for bankruptcy reorganization might offer Leibovitz her best chance to control and direct the disposition of her assets to satisfy debts. On September 11, Art Capital Group withdrew its lawsuit against Leibovitz and extended the due date for repayment of the US$24 million loan. Under the agreement, Leibovitz retains control over her work and will be the “exclusive agent in the sale of her real property (land) and copyrights”.

In March 2010, Colony Capital concluded a new financing and marketing agreement with Leibovitz, paying off Art Capital and removing or reducing the risks to Leibovitz of losing her artistic works and real estate. The following month, Brunswick Capital Partners sued Leibovitz, claiming it was owed several hundred thousand dollars for helping her restructure her debt. In December 2012, Leibovitz listed her West Village townhouse for sale at $33 million, stating she wanted to move closer to her daughter.

In 2015, Leibovitz was the principal photographer for the 2016 Pirelli calendar. Leibovitz took a drastic shift from the calendar traditional style by focusing on admirable women as opposed to sexuality. The calendar included Amy Schumer, Serena Williams, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz had previously worked on the 2000 calendar.