Through Her Lens

She struggled over whether to publish the few photos from Sontag's last weeks of life. "They are very tough pictures," she says. "People have said it's important to publish them because so much is masked from us about what the end really is." Leibovitz starts to choke up again. "I think Susan would really be proud of those pictures--but she's dead. Now if she were alive, she would not want them published. It's really a difference. It's really strange." Later, collecting her thoughts, she says, "I've been through everything mentally and emotionally, and I'm very comfortable with them. This book is me."

Most powerful may be the image of Sontag in death, a photograph that evokes a 19th-century memento mori. In counterpoint are the pictures of Leibovitz's own children. She gave birth as a single mother to her daughter Sarah just after 9/11. Then, a few months after Sontag and Leibovitz's father died, her twin girls were born, via a surrogate mother. She named one Susan and the other Samuelle, after her dad. "I saw my life with Susan, my life with my family, I saw the birth of my children," she recalls of looking at all the pictures together. "I was mesmerized by the personal stuff. I just loved it."

Leibovitz's book also provides a comprehensive view of the public side of a photographer of legendary ambition and tenacity. Her well-known subjects describe her as a perfectionist who will do almost anything to get the picture she wants. "She has this kind of burning focus," says Roseanne Cash, who's been photographed by Leibovitz several times--once on a beach in Maine in December when it was 3 degrees below zero. "She arrives at a shoot with all these people," says Mikhail Baryshnikov. "It's very intense--absolutely intense!" If time allowed, Leibovitz would spend two or three days around a portrait subject first, just getting ideas. Despite the meticulous planning, the perfect image can come out of the blue. Take Leibovitz's Jack Nicholson picture. Whenever she was busy setting up a shot inside his Mulholland Drive house, he'd disappear out back to drive golf balls--and that became the photograph. And believe it or not, she didn't intend to shoot Bill Gates at his computer--but it was where she found him when he wandered away from her lights.

It may be her perfectionism that makes Leibovitz question her own work. "I'm not a great studio portraitist," she says in the book's introduction. That accolade she reserves for such photographers as Richard Avedon. "His work is a great reminder about trying to be simple and strong," she says. Avedon knew how to talk to his subjects and "get them animated, or thinking about anything but having their picture taken." Leibovitz, on the other hand, likes to look rather than converse. "I'm still learning how to make the portrait more alive," she says. Early in her career--she started working for Rolling Stone back when it was based in San Francisco--she might spend days or weeks on the road with a band, taking pictures behind the scenes; but the more formal shots for the magazine's cover were different. "It wasn't like life as it was happening--my portraits started to feel like after the decisive moment," she says, laughing. "I made myself feel a little better by saying it's the studied moment." As her magazine work has become more elaborate, Leibovitz seems to long for the feeling of reportage. "It would be nice once in a while to do some Life Magazine real-world imagery instead of making it up all the time," she says. She cites a favorite recent shoot with Anderson Cooper in New Orleans after Katrina. "I do work for one of the largest magazine conglomerates in the world [Condé Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair and Vogue], and they have an agenda for me," she notes. "I'm trying to work within that and still try to do good work." In the end, what matters to her most is not any individual picture. "I've always thought the strength of my work has been in the body of the work. "

Thanks to that success as a documentarian of our culture, Leibovitz has had the means to become a serious collector of photographs--by Robert Frank, Nan Goldin and of course Avedon. But the very first photograph she bought was by Cartier-Bresson, the famous image "On the Banks of the Marne." Yes, it's a beautiful composition--a decisive moment. But it also reflects what's perhaps an ideal for a photographer so associated with the artifice of celebrity: a picture of an anonymous family on a riverbank, having a picnic. What it looks like most is life as it's happening.

With Jac Chebatoris

© 2006