The queen of photography: Why the stars always come out for Annie Leibovitz

Mutterings of disappointment may have risen from Buckingham Palace last week as Queen Elizabeth II packed for her hullaballooed state visit to the United States. She had sat for that famous photographer from Vanity Fair - what was her name, Annie Leibovitz? - and she hadn't even made the magazine's cover. They will, no doubt, be gratified to see that this foolish error has been corrected on the front of the UK edition.

We have all seen one of the images of Her Majesty taken by Leibovitz, assisted by a team of flitting assistants, during a session in the White Drawing Room in March. And we know how it has divided the critics. "All the personality of a marble bust of George Washington," said one. But there are more, splashed across inside pages of June's Vanity Fair, where Leibovitz has been chief photographer since 1983.

That the palace should have turned to Leibovitz is understandable. She is surely the pre-eminent photo-portraitist of America's rich and famous. (The Queen is in America and certainly meets the other criteria.) But arguably it also reduces her to just another Hollywood commodity, alongside the likes of Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise and David Beckham, all recent targets of Leibovitz's lens.

How galling, then, to discover that, in the American edition at least, it is a dust-blown Willis and his motorcycle who benefit from the front-page treatment. Her Majesty just gets a brief blurb on the cover - "Queen Elizabeth sits for Annie Leibovitz" - just to the left of the actor's scuffed left knee. But if she wants to be part of today's celebrity contest, she had better get used to the competition.

Her transition to Hollywood was, of course, prepared by her celluloid imitator, Helen Mirren. Now it is almost as if Her Majesty felt compelled to remind the citizens of the former colony across the water that Dame Helen was merely an impostor and she, by heaven, is the real thing. Give them some pictures over-blowing her very royalty to the greatest possible degree and the attention will come back to her.

Because that is what Leibovitz, 57, has done. Her mission is not to reveal the hidden frailty or humanity of her subjects - which is what Mirren did in The Queen - but to enhance everything that has made them famous in the first place. She gives them a role, in fact, and pumps up the pixels to create an enhanced reality. Willis is rugged. The Queen is all majesty in her Stewart Parvin gown and Queen Mary tiara.

With some marketing help from her editors at Vanity Fair and at Vogue, she also makes pictures that become popular happenings, a part of her reputation that presumably also appealed to Buckingham Palace. There have been more than 130 portraits - by camera and paintbrush - of Queen Elizabeth II, but these are the ones the public, certainly in America, will probably remember the longest.

Few of us cannot recall at least one Leibovitz portrait from over the years, whether it was the naked John Lennon lying in a foetal position beside a clothed Yoko Ono, her black hair fanning out from her head, or an entirely naked and gorgeously pregnant Demi Moore taken for Vanity Fair. If not those, how about Clint Eastwood bound up in ropes, a naked Sly Stallone in the Rodin thinker pose or Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk? "I think that at some point in the 1980s, photography turned from being an exchange between two people into an event," the author Sam Jones once noted. "I think Annie Leibovitz was partly responsible for creating a style in which photography became a chance to make everything larger than life."

Leibovitz was only 19 when Rolling Stone bought a picture she had snapped of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg smoking pot at a Vietnam protest and put it on the cover, elevating her to chief photographer just five years later. She stayed at the magazine until 1983, when she defected to Vanity Fair shortly before it fell under the editorship of Tina Brown. "She makes every page sing," Ms Brown later said of her.

While her celebrity niche is unassailable - she can charge more than $100,000 (£50,000) a day but waived her fee at the palace - Leibovitz has taken other turns over her career. She was the official photographer at the Mexico World Cup in 1986 and in 1987 completed her award-winning "Portraits" series for American Express. Encouraged by her late lover, the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag who died of cancer in 2004, to explore more serious themes, she took war photographs in Sarajevo during the Balkans war. And she has published several books, the most recent being A Photographer's Life 1990-2005.

Accompanying a touring exhibition which will land at the National Portrait Gallery in London next year, the book offers a rare glimpse of the private life of Leibovitz, which she had hitherto jealously guarded. Not all the pictures in it are comfortable and include one of Sontag lying dead in a funeral home, dressed in a pleated fashion gown, and others of Leibovitz's father after his death from lung cancer. Another, taken by Sontag, shows Leibovitz naked in hospital after a Caesarean section. The women had a 14-year relationship and Leibovitz is now raising their three young daughters.

The book, she told The Independent earlier this year, "was a sculpture. And that really was from my heart. It's the best book I have ever done, and it was a way of trying to be understood in some way. You publish it because at some level everyone wants to be understood, it's totally your soul and your inside." She also explained, however, that first and foremost she remains a "working photographer" with clients to satisfy, whether it is Vanity Fair or the Walt Disney Company, as it was in February when she released photographs of David Beckham for a promotional campaign for its theme parks. As usual, she made the man even larger than he is in real life, slaying a fire-breathing dragon from atop a white stallion. That, too, is what she has tried to do with our Queen. It is for others to decide whether she succeeded.