Excerpted from Annie Leibovitz at Work by Annie Leibovitz Copyright © 2008 by Annie Leibovitz.

Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

When I was young and just starting out as a photographer, I worked for Rolling Stone, which was then a small magazine published in San Francisco. It was devoted mostly to rock and roll. I didn’t actually know much about rock and roll, but I was grateful to be able to take pictures and see them published. It didn’t matter what the subject was. What mattered was photography. Being a photographer was my life. I took pictures all the time, and pretty much everything I photographed seemed interesting. Every single time I went out to take a picture was different. The circumstances were different. The place was different. The dynamics were different. Every single time. You never knew what was going to unfold.

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