American photographer Annie Leibowitz was BOTD in 1949. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut to a military family, she started taking photos in her teens while living in Vietnam, where her father was posted during the Vietnam War. She returned to the United States to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, switching to photography after discovering the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She launched her career at rock magazine Rolling Stone, taking intimate documentary-style photos of celebrities, most notably the Rolling Stones. Her 1980 portrait of Yoko Ono being cradled by a naked John Lennon became world famous when Lennon was killed five hours later the photo. Leibowitz moved to Vanity Fair in 1983, abandoning naturalism in favour of glossy, high-concept, heavily art-directed photographs, eloquently chronicling the capitalist excess of Reaganite America. Her most famous portraits from this period include Joan and Jackie Collins, Demi Moore (who posed naked while heavily pregnant) and Whoopi Goldberg lying in a bath of milk. Leibowitz moved to American Vogue in the later 1990s, adopting a more stripped-back minimalist style. In recent years, her work has raised controversy, notably her portrait of a naked 15 year-old Miley Cyrus, Black basketball star LeBron James posed as King Kong, and a glossy portrait of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife in the midst of the Ukrainian war. Leibowitz has three children from a previous marriage. Persistently reluctant to define her sexuality, she was in a high-profile relationship with writer Susan Sontag from 1989 until Sontag’s death in 2004. Still the gold standard for celebrity photography, she continues to work for Vogue, Vanity Fair and other Conde Nast magazines. Her current relationship status is unknown.