Annie leibovitz susan sontag ill images

Venus and Serena Williams, Sheryl Sandberg, Malala – these are just some of the powerful women captured on camera by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz for her WOMEN: New Portraits series which is being shown in Zurich.

Confidence

Ann DeWitt on Annie Leibovitz’s Photographs of Susan Sontag

In Greek mythology Proteus was able to change shape with relative ease—from wild boar to lion to dragon to fire to flood.  But what he found difficult, and would not do unless seized or chained, was to commit to a single form, the form most his own, and carry out his function of prophecy. 

— Marvin Israel, Birthday Card to Diane Arbus, 1971

In 1973, Susan Sontag said of the nation’s increasing obsession with photography, “Kodak put signs at the entrances of many towns listing what to photograph.”[1]  Sontag’s own life could have populated a town and had its very own sign.  But in 1973, America’s focus was on other landscapes.  As Sontag notes in On Photography, photographers, laymen and otherwise, were capturing images of a once hidden middle-America through the scope of the photographic lens.  The American family was embracing the photo album with a catholic philistinism, reclaiming Nature as well as the nature of time in a “program of populist transcendence.”[2] It had been that way, says Sontag, ever since the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, when the camera rode the rail West.  Like so many of Sontag’s essays on aesthetics—rife with literary comparisons and insistent on bridging the gap between literature and the “craft based arts”—here Sontag stakes photography’s evolution with Whitman: “Nobody would fret about beauty and ugliness, he implies, who was accepting a sufficiently large embrace of the real, of the inclusiveness and vitality of actual American experience.”[3] “The United States,” Whitman offered, “themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”  Sontag interprets the work of Walker Evans and Diane Arbus through a similarly optimistic intersection: “All facts, even mean ones, are incandescent in Whitman’s America—that ideal space, made real by history, where ‘as they emit themselves facts are showered with life.’”  It was photography’s job to demystify the ordin

Over the course of their 15-year friendship, Susan Sontag would often complain to Annie Leibovitz that, despite being one of the most famous photographers in the world, she never took any pictures whenever they went out together. It's a complaint that Leibovitz has had cause to look back on, lately, as a grim kind of irony: during the last weeks of Sontag's life, Leibovitz forced herself to take photographs and now, nearly two years after her friend's death, she has published them in a book. There will be some who think she should not have done.

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 is Leibovitz's photographic account of the years during which the two women knew each other, and the pictures are both personal, of her parents, siblings and children, and professional - of Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the other Hollywood stars Leibovitz shot for the cover of Vanity Fair - as well as landscapes, war reportage and portraits of the unfamous. Interspersed are pictures of Sontag and herself as they travelled around the world together, at their flat in Paris and their homes in New York, where they lived in apartments directly opposite each other. In public at least, they never referred to themselves as a couple. "Words like 'companion' and 'partner' were not in our vocabulary," Leibovitz says. "We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still 'friend'."

We are in Leibovitz's office in New York and she exudes a kinetic energy that takes her to the window and back several times; her hair's kind of crazy and there's a heft to her that for some reason makes me think she's the sort of person who, if her bag were snatched in the street, would sprint after the thief and snatch it right back. She is not long returned from her most recent, hugely publicised shoot of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and their baby at their ranch in Colorado. (Leibovitz wanted the whole family, including the in-laws, to be inc

This is a short monologue which uses the death of Susan Sontag as a jumping off point. Like much of the subject of death and grief, it is very personal. I can see that later on in my journey, I might well expand on this work as it feels important at this stage that my visual work which explores my own grief should have some kind of introduction.

I was reading about Susan Sontag and her terminal cancer and that her partner Annie Leibovitz recorded Sontag’s illness and death and I reflected that there was a similarity with my own experiences and project work. Leibovitz produced a huge book called “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005” which I looked out. Lebovitz isn’t a photographer I have spared much time for as I always thought her work was about photographing famous people and am less interested in fame than in ordinary people. However, when I looked at this book, I found much more than images of the famous and the rich. In her introduction she writes that in 2004 after Susan Sontag’s death she started searching for photographs to put into a little book to give to people at the memorial service. (Leibovitz, 2006) When I read this, my first thought was that this was eerily like the process Roland Barthes went through when looking for a photograph which summed up his sense of his mother. I then stepped back and thought that actually what Leibovitz and Barthes describe is a normal human reaction to death and loss. Many of us must go through exactly the same process whether looking through photographs, letters, clothes, keepsakes or even the spaces the dead people lived in, searching for a sense of what has been lost. Leibovitz says that, “The project was important to me, because it made me feel close to her and helped me begin to say good-bye”. (Leibovitz, 2006) Sontag’s son David Rieff writes that there is no sense of good-bye, “What does that leave? Closure? Again, I do not believe for an instant that there is any such thing. If there is