Leibovitz, 60, will retain total control of her multimillion-dollar portfolio under the deal she signed with Colony Capital LLC of Santa Monica, Calif., on Monday, said Richard Nanula, a principal with the firm.

Under the agreement, Colony will become the photographer’s sole creditor and help market her archive of such provocative images as a nude John Lennon cuddling with a clothed Yoko Ono hours before his death, as well as a nude and very pregnant Demi Moore.

Leibovitz obtained an extension last year to repay a $24 million loan to a Manhattan firm, Art Capital Group, in a financial dispute that had threatened her rights to those images and others.

The specific terms of the new deal were not disclosed, but Nanula said “it pays off all the Art Capital loan. … It cleans up the rest of her balance sheet.”

The Colony loan also contains more than $20 million of real estate collateral, Nanula added – Leibovitz’s three Manhattan town houses. The Art Capital loan was repaid Monday, he said.

Art Capital confirmed the repayment and said in a statement that it “is pleased to announce that its loan to Annie Leibovitz has been satisfied. We are encouraged by the results of this complex transaction and wish Ms. Leibovitz the best in all of her future endeavors.”

“It’s long-term in nature,” Nanula said of the partnership with Leibovitz. “Our interest is in helping her be successful and to be her financial partner.”

“Colony is a dedicated and creative team,” Leibovitz said in a statement. “We will be working on new projects, and I will have the support and freedom necessary for nurturing my work and preserving my archive.”

“Colony Capital, LLC has formed a new partnership with Annie Leibovitz, one of world’s greatest portrait photographers,” the firm said in a statement. “We are delighted to be able to do that here by partnering with Ms. Leibovitz in a business relationship that allows her to continue to flourish as an artist while together we seek opportunities to enhance the value of the magnificent body of work she has created over the past 40 years.”

Those opportunities, Nanula said, could involve traveling exhibitions of Leibovitz’s works, books and fine-art copies of her photographs.

He stressed that any commercialization of her work would be decided by Leibovitz and that Colony would be her financial partner in any such venture.

Leibovitz’s portfolio is estimated to contain more than 100,000 images and 1 million negatives.

“It’s one of the most valuable and unexploited” photo archives, Nanula said.

The deal between Colony and Leibovitz was first reported in the Financial Times on Tuesday.

Colony Capital is a global firm that focuses primarily on real estate-related assets, securities and operating companies. Last year, it purchased a loan with a face value of $23.5 million on Michael Jackson’s Neverland in California, giving it the rights to the late singer’s nearly 3,000-acre property.

In the course of her 40-year career, Leibovitz’s lens has captured such famous faces as Queen Elizabeth II and Bruce Springsteen, many for the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue and Rolling Stone.

In 2008, Leibovitz put up as collateral the three town houses, an upstate New York property and the copyright to her images to secure the Art Capital loan to repay debt that the firm said stemmed from mortgage obligations, tax liens and unpaid bills.

Art Capital, an independent provider of financing for the art world, agreed at the time it extended the repayment on the loan to sell back the rights to her works.

Manhattan-based Art Capital Group says Leibovitz borrowed the money last year because she was in dire financial straits due to unpaid bills, mortgage payments and tax liens.

The breach of contract lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Manhattan state Supreme Court, says that in return Leibovitz granted Art Capital the right to sell all of her photographs, plus her homes in Manhattan and upstate New York.

The lawsuit says Leibovitz and her associates are now trying to ignore their obligations.

A spokesman for Leibovitz denies the allegations.

Matthew Hiltzik says the suit is part of Art Capital’s “continued harassment.”

I get pretty upset when people argue against equality, but there is one particular argument that gets me more than most. It goes something like this: since civil unions and marriage are really the same thing with a different name, why can’t LGBT Americans just settle for the former in order to keep from offending those who consider the latter a religious institution?

The incredibly obvious answer is that civil unions and marriage aren’t equal at all. Setting aside the fact that even if civil unions and civil marriage were completely identical institutions the division would still violate our judicial ideal that separate can never be equal, there are very real federal benefits and rights that come along with marriage that same-sex couples can never receive.

In fact, there are over 1,000 benefits that marriage couples receive from the federal government that same-sex couples can’t access, including the ability to save money by filing joint tax returns and receiving access to government pensions and health insurance. (A married lesbian couple in Massachusetts actually filed a lawsuit last week, arguing that they’ve to paid $15,000 more in taxes than a straight couple would have to, since they are forced to file separately each year.)

One additional inequality that comes along with the federal distinction is the difference in inheritance law for married straight couples and same-sex couples who can’t be married under federal law.

This issue has been given a face and a name after The New York Times reported last month that photographer Annie Leibowitz was forced to use her work as collateral in order to secure a loan and resolve her financial difficulties. Queerty and After Ellen have both reported that some of the financial difficulties faced by Leibowitz were likely due to the fact that when her long-time partner Susan Sontag died in 2004, Leibowitz would have had to pay significant taxes on her inheritance– a tax liability that wouldn’t have been incurred if they were a married, opposite-sex couple.

Annie Leibowitz is just one of many to have been hit by these discriminatory regulations, to be sure, but her relatively public case does underscore an important point. Equality is more than a hypothetical ideal, and inequality is not in name only. There are very real consequences to our continued reliance on a system that treats some people different than others, and those differences can be catastrophic.