LONDON.- UBS announced an international tour of newly commissioned photographs by world renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz focusing on portraits of women. Launching in London in January 2016, the exhibition will travel to 10 global cities in 12 months. Host cities will include Tokyo, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico City, Istanbul, Frankfurt, New York, and Zurich. Access will be free to the public.

The new work is a continuation of a project Leibovitz began over fifteen years ago, when she published a book of portraits made in collaboration with Susan Sontag. That book, Women, was accompanied by an exhibition that opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Women is Leibovitz’s most enduringly popular series of photographs and she has long wanted to expand her exploration of the subject. The new portraits, in an exhibition also to be called Women, will reflect the changes in the roles of women today.

Aligned with the focus UBS places on education, learning programmes will accompany the exhibition presented in partnership with cultural organizations around the world. These initiatives will explore ways of seeing through photography, working with young people in local communities.

The new photographs will form part of the UBS Art Collection – one of the world's most important corporate collections of contemporary art comprising more than 30,000 works.

Annie Leibovitz (b. 1949) has been making witty, powerful images documenting popular culture since the early 1970s, when her work began appearing in Rolling Stone. She became the magazine's chief photographer in 1973, and ten years later began working for Vanity Fair and then Vogue. Her large and distinguished body of work encompasses some of the most well-known portraits of our time. Exhibitions of Leibovitz’s work have been shown at museums and galleries around the world including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her work is held in museum collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. to the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has published several collections of photographs and is the recipient of many honors. In 2006 she was made a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In 2009, she received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first Creative Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts and the Wexner Prize. In 2013 she received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. She has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.