A new edition of Women, the portrait collection by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, will be released by Phaidon this November as a two-volume set. The publication features the original 1999 book alongside a new companion volume, which includes more than 100 portraits created between 2000 and the present.
The 2025 edition includes new portraits of women activists, artists, authors, musicians, and world leaders. Among them is Rihanna, pictured reclining at the Ritz Paris during her pregnancy in an image originally shot for Vogue in 2022. Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is pictured in a Maryland library, while folk singer Joan Baez appears barefoot on a tree branch, guitar in hand. Alongside these photographs, the book features several newly commissioned essays from Adichie and feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem.
The original Women was a collaboration between Leibovitz and her partner, the late writer Susan Sontag. The project paired an essay by Sontag with portraits that examined how femininity and power were represented at the turn of the millennium. Leibovitz later described the work as open-ended, telling the New York Times in 2016 that “It’s not one of those projects that will ever have an ending.”
Subjects of the original edition included astronaut Eileen Collins, artist Louise Bourgeois, and Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sontag’s accompanying essay questioned how a book of women’s portraits might be received differently than a similar book of portraits of men.
In 2016, Leibovitz revisited the concept for an exhibition titled “Women: New Portraits,” organized by global wealth manager UBS. The exhibition was staged in London and New York, and featured images of singer Adele, former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, and First Lady Michelle Obama.
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