Episode Details

Five hours before John Lennon was murdered, Annie Leibovitz photographed him nude, curled around a fully clothed Yoko Ono, and he told her the Polaroid captured their relationship exactly. This episode builds a narrative of the artist behind that image: born in 1949 to an Air Force lieutenant colonel and a modern dance instructor, raised on a constant rotation of military bases, and trained by that nomadic childhood to read a room, its power structure, and its body language before ever picking up a camera in the Philippines during the Vietnam War era.

We follow her from the San Francisco Art Institute and a kibbutz in Israel to Rolling Stone, where she became chief photographer by 1973 with a fly-on-the-wall method that peaked, and nearly killed her, on the Rolling Stones' 1975 tour. Then comes the pivot to engineered intimacy and the theatrical, strobe-lit Vanity Fair era, her decades-long relationship with Susan Sontag, motherhood at 52, the 2009 financial crisis that forced her to use her entire archive as loan collateral, the controversies over a Vogue cover and a teen pop star shoot, and her 2016 reinvention of a famously hypersexualized tire company calendar.

• How a childhood of constant relocation became the toolkit of a portrait photographer
• Why the documentary immersion of the 1970s came at a severe personal cost
• The Lennon and Ono shoot as a deliberate reversal of traditional gender dynamics
• Scaling a Chrysler Building gargoyle and other logistical extremes of the Vanity Fair years
• Whose soul you are really seeing when you look at an iconic portrait