Bookplanet: Annie Leibowitz photography book (including photos of dying lover Susan Sontag)

My time with Susan
A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005, by Annie Leibovitz
From the outside, it looked like an odd relationship - Annie Leibovitz, celebrity photographer, and Susan Sontag, writer and intellect. Yet they were a couple for 15 years, travelling the world and sharing their lives. Now Leibovitz has put together her images of Sontag in a book to tell their story. Interview by Emma Brockes
(from the good old Guardian)

'The closest word is still "friend"'... Annie Leibovitz on Susan Sontag.

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 included in the photographs, but "Tom wanted it to be about the baby... It was his call and I wanted him to be happy.") An article in the New York Times suggested the whole thing was in bad taste and not up to Leibovitz's high standard, to which she snappishly responds, "You know, they are baby pictures. That is what they are."

From the outside it looked like an odd match: Leibovitz's movie-star razzle and Sontag's literary seriousness. But Leibovitz says that although Sontag loved a nine-hour German documentary as much as the next intellectual, it was she who would drag Leibovitz to see cheesy films starring Keanu Reeves, rather than the other way round. Some of the most moving photographs in the book show a different side to Sontag, a side "where you see her vulnerability. Everyone thinks she was so strong, and she was, but she was also very vulnerable. When I walked into the apartment where I first met her, she had these little collections of rocks and shells." There is a photograph of the round, smooth pebbles from Sontag's collection that appears in the book just after pictures of her death. "They become symbolic, of course, because..." Leibovitz's voice dies. "For obvious reasons."

The two met at a photo shoot in 1988, when Leibovitz took publicity pictures for Sontag's book, Aids And Its Metaphors. Leibovitz was 39, Sontag 55. "She was just the person I wanted to meet, at the right time," Leibovitz says, which is to say someone who by virtue of her own extraordinary qualities would encourage Leibovitz to be the best that she could be. They admired each other's ambition. They made each other laugh. "It was this wonderful moment."

Leibovitz grew up one of six children. Her father was in the air force, her mother was a housewife and teacher, and if she talks loudly and is impatient then it is partly, she says, due to this large and noisy family background. After school, she enrolled as an art student at the San Francisco Art Institute and signed up for a module in photography. Leibovitz wasn't yet 20 when she sent some examples of her work to Rolling Stone and was hired on the spot by the art director. She would work at the magazine for the next 13 years, going on the road with the biggest bands, exploiting her youth and talent for unobtrusiveness to get the best access. By the early 1980s she was ready to move on and Vanity Fair had the polish, and the budget, to win her.

The move to Vanity Fair brought with it new frustrations. Leibovitz was used to working alone. Now she had whole studios of people at her disposal and she found it cumbersome. Although her working manner is mild and thoughtful, she has been known to yell at people, for example when a studio assistant fails to read her mind. A friend once told her she had anger issues and Leibovitz concedes that this may well have been the case, once, but that she has definitely improved; having children, she says, has forced patience on her.

Within weeks of Sontag's death, Leibovitz's father died of lung cancer and there are photographs of him in the book, too, which bear a weird resemblance to those of Sontag in her last days, as if to prove a point about the democracy of death. The book, she says, "came out of grief". But it came out of life, also; Leibovitz gave birth to her daughter Sarah in 2001, with Sontag at her hospital bedside. After Sontag's death in December 2004, she had twins Susan and Samuelle - her father's name was Samuel - with the aid of a surrogate mother. The book is therefore "about life and the life cycle". It has a moral force to it.

In the early days of their relationship, Sontag was ambivalent about Leibovitz's desire to have children. "I think she wanted me to herself. I think she didn't think I was serious enough. 'Let's talk about it when you're serious about it,' she would say. And I made a decision myself to have children and then she was very supportive. But it took me making my own decision. She loved Sarah. She just loved Sarah."

Leibovitz was 51 when Sarah was born. She never intended to wait that long, she says, but the time flew by and she was always absorbed in her work. Her own parents supported her decision to have a baby and, because she lived in New York, she was insulated from a certain amount of the disapproval directed at mothers of her age. It's still taboo, though, and I wonder if she feels it.

"Oh, I've given up feeling... I mean, I've broken so many of those things, although I feel very conventional in some ways." She imagines that one day her children will rage at her for their unconventional beginnings and she hopes, if they do, it will be helpful for them to have each other. Second time round, she says, "I felt a little stupid that I didn't consider it might be twins, because with in vitro [fertilisation], multiple birth is very common. I remember my mother rang me up and said, how are you going to cope and I said, I'm not going to. I mean, it's going to be terrible for the first five years. But there's a picture in the book of Sarah and Susan, and that says it all. She's just holding that baby and she's so proud."

Leibovitz was by Sontag's bedside when she was receiving treatment for cancer. The hardest photos in the book relate to these times, and before deciding to publish them, Leibovitz consulted a small circle of Sontag's friends. There was controversy within the group, but in the end they supported a decision to publish. Leibovitz wanted to show what illness looks like and what courage looks like, too. "She didn't want to die. She put up... She wanted to live. She wanted to write more books. That last year of her life, she fought this fight, it was unbelievable. And she was so brave. It was amazing. It was too much. There's this question: how can you publish these pictures? Well, you could never publish them while she was alive. But she's dead. And that's the bottom line." She pauses. "Susan loved the good fight. And there's no doubt in my mind - and I do this as if she was standing behind me - that she would be championing this work."

Leibovitz's great regret is that she wasn't there when Sontag died. By that stage, late 2004, she was shuttling between Sontag's bedside and that of her desperately ill father in Florida. The day she left her, Sontag was looking rough, but she was undergoing last-minute chemotherapy and Leibovitz had seen her that sick before. "And so I kissed her goodbye and I said I love you and she said I love you." Hours later, as she walked through the door in Florida with Sarah, anxious to settle the little girl down, she got a call from David, Sontag's son, saying that it didn't look good and she should come straight back. "I said, 'Do you think I can take the first flight in the morning?' And he said, 'Yes, yes, I think that'd be fine. We have time.' I was in the airport waiting [the next morning] and they called me to say she had died. And they kept her there for me. But she was gone." Leibovitz told the undertaker, "I don't want any make-up on her. I don't want any of that crap." She took a photograph of Sontag lying on the gurney, bruises from an IV still vivid on her arms.

It wasn't until some time afterwards that she started looking through photographs. Leibovitz wanted to put together a memorial book to give to friends and family, and started finding images she didn't know she had. The meaning of a photograph changes when the person in it dies, and so it was that she started to see shapes forming and a line coming together. The opening photograph in the book is of Sontag standing in a canyon in Jordan, a tiny figure surrounded by darkness, looking out towards the light. "I was using her for scale, but it became a symbolic picture of Susan and her love of travel and civilisation and nature and art." If, as Sontag complained, Leibovitz skimped on taking photographs during the normal run of things, it was because "the more you know about someone, the harder it is to take. It has to do with knowing how they imagine they see themselves. And I think that when you love them, you don't want to disappoint them."

Leibovitz sold the New York apartment that overlooked Sontag's and is selling their apartment in Paris. But she is as in demand as ever and the work goes on. "The moment I put this book together, I felt such a sense of strength and something from Susan, something Susan gave me from her death. And she is still giving me things. It's funny because - although in the end she wanted her diaries published - Susan always said she felt that art really had to rise above the personal." Leibovitz disagrees.


2. While Susan Sontag lay dying
As a writer Susan Sontag located herself behind her subject. After her death it is her personality that is memorialised. Angela McRobbie deciphers this use of a great intellectual's legacy.
By Angela McRobbie

The unseemliness of Annie Leibovitz, one of the world's best-known photographers, publishing in the Guardian, intimate portraits of her lover Susan Sontag in the months before she died in December 2004 and then in the immediate aftermath of her death as she was laid out in the mortuary gurney, is perhaps only explicable in terms of her mourning, anger and outrage at being abandoned.

In this respect it outflanks an article by Sontag's son David Rieff published some months earlier. At her bedside, he presented an account of her dying which also might better have remained an important private moment between mother and son. It surely cheapened her stature to describe what seemed to be her sheer disbelief and fury that she too, like everyone else, was having to face extinction. "I'm special", she appeared to be saying, "so special".

Even earlier, Terry Castle, a Californian-based writer and sometime friend of Sontag's wrote a particularly scurrilous, indeed spiteful memoir which was published in the London Review of Books ("Desperately Seeking Susan", 17 March 2005) It was a well-rehearsed piece, as though the author had been saving up for this opportunity for many years, having been sidelined by Sontag despite some period of friendship and even intimacy.

Sontag it seemed had never reciprocated with sufficient warmth and zeal, the abundance of emotion and admiration displayed by the repudiated Castle; but so self-pitying and moralistic was Castle's account of her years of servitude, that this reader at least sympathised fully with Sontag's sudden and unexplained disappearance into a taxi, midway through an evening out with Castle, leaving her friend bewildered on the pavement.

Love is invariably shot through with ambivalence, and in death an opportunity arises to castigate she or he who has done the leaving. But what is surprisingly conventional about these outbursts in print or in image is the revelation of personality. It is unimaginable in contemporary life not to "have" a personality and, in possession of such a thing, not subsequently to project this authentic self in the context of one's other attributes and capacities.

Sontag has been endlessly berated for many years by gay and lesbian activists for refusing to wholeheartedly take on a lesbian identity, and again it is only on her death and the publication of some of her diaries dating back to the 1950s that her self-description as queer really surfaces. But still this refusal to project identity or personality, a refusal which is now being so busily countered by these biographical sketches, undermines what was surely one of Sontag's most marked contributions - which was to refute the position of writer as dogmatic personality; as the person who presided over the text, who was its owner as well as its author.

Sontag spent a good deal of time in France in the early 1960s, at that moment when literary modernism ( Samuel Beckett ,Antonin Artaud ) with its insistence on divided selves was just about to be supplanted by the even more forceful undermining of the magisterial, authorial self which semiology, structuralism and then post-structuralism inaugurated.

Sontag's writing at that time reflected both these trends, her short fictions I Etcetera and indeed her foray into film-directing each revealing a cold, erotically-charged modernism, with few, if any, traces of authorial personality; while her introduction of Roland Barthes to a wider public demonstrated her enthusiasm for his "death of the author" stance, and for his crisp analysis of those structures set in place which merely had to be activated by the writer. The work writes you, Roland Barthes said, and this permitted a kind of downgrading or removal of the author-God from the scene of the narrative and from the whole burden of originality, inspiration and uniqueness.

It is ironic then that Susan Sontag is now being deified in a way which counters the sensibility of her own style, which was invariably to locate herself behind the work which she wrote about. Her much-quoted comment about mind as passion, her commitment to seriousness, her disavowal of the chat-show circuit, and latterly, her stance on the stifling of dissent in the United States after 9/11, as well as her late return to the portrayal of suffering in the photographic image, all mark her out as an intellectual for whom social and cultural critique are forms of public service, a kind of dedicating of one's intellect to the principle of democracy.

Of course the outpourings of those who loved her most will also bear the signs of the wish that she be remembered, as well as being their staking of a claim to her emotional world. But it is Leibovitz's images which are most disquieting, if only for the reason that they almost ask to be deciphered as Sontag would herself have surely, with enthusiasm, set about doing.

The claim of intimacy

This makes them strange, uncanny, uncomfortable to look at, but not because they have the capacity to illuminate beyond the frame of the domestic world which they show. Ostensibly they could be considered a treatise on the impending death of one who has both written magnificently about the cultural meanings which are invoked in response to life threatening illness, and who has therefore been well prepared as it were for mortality.

But much more prominent is the narrative they tell about the complexity of love, the rivalry, and anger of abandonment and loss, and the betrayals and disloyalties which also comprise the "psychic life of power". By so inflating, in her death, the stature of Sontag, those who were closest to her produce a kind of grand fictional identity which dwarves the painstaking nature of the work itself, a good deal of which was actually dedicated to bringing to the attention of the world, great writers who like Robert Walser, Leonid Tsypkin, Juan Rulfo or even the filmmaker as well as writer Alexander Kluge, all of whom would otherwise have remained obscure, untranslated or overlooked in the English-speaking world.

If one was to sum up an underlying ethos in Sontag’s oeuvre it was to overturn and angrily contest the drive towards simplification and anti-intellectualism, little Englandism and self-congratulatory Americanism, and the cult of the personality in literature, autobiography and confessional life-writing, all of which shape and police the landscape of literary culture today. (It was widely known to those in the field of European and world literature that often the only possibility of having work translated was to send Sontag a copy requesting that she submit a letter of support to publishers, which invariably she would do).

Most of the pictures printed in the Guardian merit consideration primarily on the topics of love, intrusiveness, publicity and exposure. This includes a banal shot of Sontag in her hotel bed awake, but covering most of her face with a white sheet, as though to ward off the unwelcome gaze of the camera, a moment of private vanity, the desire not to be snapped without having time to compose oneself, having not yet got up and brushed one’s teeth, as it were.

Pictures in her office or walking on a beach with agent Andrew Wylie, or sitting amidst pyramids or again looking weary and tired over a hotel-room breakfast, have little to say other than that there is a claim being made by Leibovitz in terms of proximity, intimacy and of she having-being-there with Sontag, sharing her bed, one assumes, sitting with her at breakfast and accompanying her on trips (see the photographer's interview with Emma Brockes, "My time with Susan", Guardian, 7 October 2006).

Those which show Sontag suffering, and undergoing chemotherapy, especially the shot of her on a stretcher on a cold-looking open tarmac about to be carried onto a waiting plane, and also those of her corpse laid out, further extend this act of claiming. We are meant to be impressed by Sontag’s courage in the months before she died, but the publication of these images conveys instead simply a kind of resignation, sadness and fortitude on Sontag’s part.

What else, after all, can one do when having to undergo chemotherapy, which may or may not work? The green-tinted image of her body laid out, wearing a pleated dress, serves primarily to ask the viewer to reflect on the nature of love and its claims on the other. Leibovitz is doing here what only she can do, this is her privilege. And so the pictures are as much about possession and about being dispossessed in loss, as they are about any social commentary on dying. These pictures suggest that the taker is temporarily "out of her mind" with grief.

A gift to life

There are only two photographs where the intensity of the dialogue between Leibovitz’s work and Sontag’s thinking is realised. The first is the cover image (in the Guardian supplement), a marvellous dark orange-tinted shot of Susan Sontag standing against the stern of a ferry, wrapped in a blanket to ward off the chill air, seemingly at dusk. There is a lifebelt attached to the rail, and the coastline can be seen in the distance. Sontag is tall, slim, and her beauty still proud, animated and engaged. She is undefeated, though it would seem fully aware that this is also for her, a ferry journey to the other side of life. This is so effective as an image of portending death that Leibovitz could easily have omitted the hospital scenes.
The other photograph which transcends the boundaries of domestic intimacy is one which shows Sontag naked, in bed, still sleeping it seems, and shot from the side, amidst the bed clothes, and with a pillow over her breasts, though revealing in a gesture to the life of sexuality and eroticism, even in middle age, part of a large, dark nipple.

This is an extraordinary sculptured image, conveying the intensity of an emotional partnership, as well as the power of love and erotic passion to create art from the passage of life as it is inscribed on the body. Sontag’s thighs are sensuously open, as though in invitation, they are heavy, marbled, and the pubic hair is still black.

There is what looks like a Caesarian scar-line, and her stomach is neither smooth nor shapely, her waist almost disappeared, yet the overall sense is of voluptuousness and sexual energy. Also total self-confidence and disregard for a world otherwise beholden to narrow and tyrannical definitions as to what constitutes female desirability. If Sontag moved uncomfortably around the word feminism, as she also did lesbianism, in her life, then in her death she makes here, of herself, something of a gift, that art and politics can indeed be productively intertwined.

(Angela McRobbie is professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, London. She is author of British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry (Routledge, 1998), In the Culture Society (Routledge, 1999), and The Uses of Cultural Studies (Sage, 2005 ). She has also written extensively on young women and popular culture and about making a living in the new cultural economy)