Halfway through her painting studies, however, she went on a vacation in Japan and the Philippines and bought a camera. Photography hooked her interest immediately. As she remarked in
ARTnews, "I was totally seduced by the wonderment of it all.... To see something that afternoon and have it materialize before your eyes that same day--there was a real immediacy to it. I lived in the darkroom. I'd spend all night there. You'd go in and you'd never want to go out." Leibovitz took night courses in photography in addition to her day classes in painting, and at age twenty she made her first photo sale to
Rolling Stone. A picture of counterculture poet Allen Ginsberg at a peace rally with a marijuana cigarette got Leibovitz started. Urged by a photographer friend to market the photo, she took her portfolio to Rolling Stone, which immediately bought the Ginsberg picture. Although she had not yet graduated from the art institute, Leibovitz quickly found a niche on the Rolling Stone staff. As she remarked in a 1983 New York article: "They really needed someone.... The good photographers in San Francisco were art-oriented and didn't want to do commercial work." If Leibovitz shared those qualms, she overcame them, and in three years she became Rolling Stone's chief photographer.
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