Photographer Annie Leibovitz's new book reflects on life, family, friends

You know Annie Leibovitz's photographs.

Whoopi Goldberg gleaming in a bathtub of milk.

Demi Moore, pregnant, nude and defiantly sensual.

President George W. Bush and his Cabinet members, solemn yet somehow chic in the Oval Office.

Leibovitz, perhaps the best-known photographer of our time, has built her career, fame and reputation with emotionally charged, visually rich images like those portraits: famous people and artists captured in persona-exaggerating moments. From the pages of Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair to her five coffee-table books — you've been looking at Leibovitz photos for decades.

Her latest book, "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life 1990-2005," reveals aspects of the woman behind the camera that you may not know as well: her motherhood (she has three beautiful young daughters); her intimate 14-year relationship with writer Susan Sontag; and her despair over the deaths of Sontag and Leibovitz's father, Samuel, in 2004, just weeks apart. The thick book (Random House, 472 pp., $75) is packed with images that are exuberant, densely serene and very sad.

"The book came out of grief," Leibovitz, 57, said in an interview this week in Seattle, where she gave a sold-out talk at the University of Washington's Kane Hall Tuesday night. A warm, intelligent, and rather tall woman, Leibovitz discussed at length her artistic processes, her family and the controversy surrounding her decision to include images of Sontag during the last weeks of her life, and those taken after her death.

Choosing the photos

Leibovitz carefully weighed which photos to include. "The hardest pictures were the ones of Susan so sick at the very, very end. They were in and out and in and out and in and out." Leibovitz consulted with a psychiatrist who worked at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, who "had worked, helping people die, for four or five years. She felt that these photographs were important. We don't get to see images of illness. That's everyday. And that's just as much a part of life as the rest of it."

On the other hand, Leibovitz "had no problem" choosing to include photographs of Sontag's body laid out at a funeral parlor. She felt comfortable including those powerfully sad and tender pictures because Leibovitz had discussed taking the pictures with Sontag's son, David, and because "there's a tradition in photography of that kind of image."

After Sontag's death, Leibovitz went through the photos she'd taken of her, looking for pictures for a small memorial book. It was a process of mourning, to be sure, but there were also revelations for Leibovitz about her work. She found more personal material than she had anticipated, personal photographs — of her family, of Sontag, of their travels together — that exhibited the same style as her early work with Rolling Stone.

"The reportage style"

That style — informal, spontaneous and journalistic, capturing everyday moments on the spot — stems from "the reportage style," learned when she went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Looking at her own photographs, Leibovitz saw how her magazine work had become consuming. Her commissioned photographs are highly composed, conceptual and often theatrical, with themes, props, setting and attire chosen carefully. But her reportage style remained in her personal, informal photographs — co-existing all along with her iconic, public portraits.

"A Photographer's Life," a 15-year retrospective, mirrors this coexistence. Arranged roughly chronologically, the "assignment work" for magazines is interwoven with the autobiographical pictures, because, as Leibovitz succinctly put it, "that's more like life."

When it came time to select images for the book, Leibovitz had her assignment work on one wall of her barn in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and her personal images on another. She was "dying to see if they would fit together." Her landscapes seemed like a third body of work until Mark Holborn, her editor, suggested using them as "punctuation." Leibovitz explained that they serve as "a way in and a way out" of the intensity of her personal stories.

A love story

One of the stories, according to Leibovitz, "is a love story." Sontag and Leibovitz shared their lives for over a decade, living within blocks of each other in New York City, traveling, and supporting each other's creative and professional pursuits. There are many photographs of the pair's travels together; their intimacy is evident in the informal photos of Sontag hanging out in their hotel rooms or homes.

In or out of the photo frame, Sontag's presence is all over the book. Leibovitz chose all of the images "with the idea of how Susan may have influenced me or what she would have liked or cared about." So, gorgeous assignment portraits of the dancers Mark Morris and Mikhail Baryshnikov, friends of Sontag's, are included in the book. As is the famous images of a pregnant Demi Moore, because Sontag had encouraged Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, to overcome her reservations and publish the images.

Leibovitz says that Sontag "raised the bar. She came into my life and gave me a big push in my work." Leibovitz was reassured "that it was OK to be serious and conscientious. It's not anything I didn't know, but she heightened my awareness of it. She was pretty much always right. I miss her tremendously."

The book showcases all of Leibovitz's different styles and subjects, creating an unexpected impression of her strengths as a photographer. You might find yourself skipping by the familiar celebrity faces in order to gaze at Leibovitz's wistful landscapes or her casual, but emotion-laden, family vignettes.

Fame can actually get in the way of noticing the art in the images. We think about how fragile and glamorous Nicole Kidman looks, for instance, or nod at the audacity of Chris Rock for being shown in white-face makeup. The lesser-known, personal images do stand out for all they reveal of Leibovitz's personality and personal history, but they have all the hallmarks of the formal works you know so well. In fact, in the shots from her private life, it is easier to see the stunning visual qualities — the composition, lighting and especially the intense textures that Leibovitz creates. After studying these images, you can go back to recognize these same elements in the more exaggerated, highly staged configurations.

Death and birth

Also, there's a story of loss in the book that is often hard to take in. Immediately following the images of Sontag's death are photographs of Leibovitz's father's last days, and of his funeral. Turning the page from a photograph of graveside soil, you next see a close-up of Sontag's rock collection. The photo, taken more than a decade before Sontag's death, now takes on symbolic meaning.

This sequence of pages is almost heartbreaking. But then, turning just one page more, there is the birth of Leibovitz's twin daughters, via surrogate, Susan and Samuelle. While Leibovitz doesn't plan on using her daughters extensively in future work, the stunning and sweet photographs of the twins, and of Leibovitz's oldest daughter Sarah, provide necessary moments of joy and relief in the book.

Leibovitz thinks of the book as "sculpture," a work of art created as a whole, with all of the pictures working to "sort of comfort each other and take care of each other. I like the weight of it. I like that they're not separated."

"A Photographer's Life" is Leibovitz's life, an intimate document of her work, family and love. At the same time, it's all our stories. "This life isn't so different," Leibovitz said. "Birth, life, death. It's what we all go through."

Gayle Clemans is a freelance art critic for The Seattle Times. Reach her at gclemans@u.washington.edu