15 years of Annie Leibovitz's favourite photos on exhibit

An exhibit of photographer Annie Leibovitz’s work has launched at the Brooklyn Museum with a mix of personal and celebrity photos from the past 15 years.

“You see her talent in a very different way, you see the scope of her abilities,” said Charlotta Kotik, the show’s curator.

Leibovitz says her favourite photos arethose of her parents, her three children and her friends.

“I realize it's the strongest work, because they are the people that know you, and put up with you and let you enter their lives, and they're the people you know the longest,” the 58-year-old photographer said.

Leibovitz has been documenting American popular culture since the early 1970s when she was chief photographer for Rolling Stone, a position she kept until 1983. One of her most famous photos for the magazine’s cover is of a naked John Lennon hugging a clothed Yoko Ono, taken in 1980.

Since then, she has worked as the main portrait photographer for Vanity Fair as well as other publications.

The museum exhibit titled Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 features 200 images, all of which are in a book of the same name that has been published concurrently.

The idea of including personal photographs came after the 2004 death of her longtime companion, the writer Susan Sontag, followed by the death of Leibovitz’s father and the birth of her twin daughters.

She had never intended the photos of her children, those of Sontag struggling with cancer and of her father near the end of his life to become public.

"When I photographed personally, I don't think I ever had an agenda or imagined where it might go, and I never would have looked at it if Susan hadn't died and my father hadn't died. But I felt so moved," she said. "I looked at that work and it meant so much to me.”

The exhibit is organized chronologically and contains photographs of many famous people, such as a naked and very pregnant Demi Moore, Brad Pitt lounging on a mattress, filmmaker Michael Moore and U.S. President George W. Bush and his cabinet.

The exhibit moves from Brooklyn after Jan. 21, 2007, to San Diego and then Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. International stops include Paris and London.