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 theat ...