THE first time she had dinner with the author Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz sweated through her clothes because she thought she "couldn't talk" to this powerful intellect, who had written a seminal book on photography, Leibovitz's own craft. At that time, in 1989, Leibovitz was one of the world's most successful photographers.
Having made her name photographing rock stars for Rolling Stone magazine, she was now six years into a career as a staff photographer at Vanity Fair, and had made a mark through iconic celebrity shots such as her portrait of Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk, or Sting caked in mud and standing in a yoga pose against the Lucerne Valley. She was, effectively, court portraitist to the entertainment and political stars of America, responsible, in part, for shaping the way the country saw itself. And yet with Sontag, the charismatic writer, activist and intellectual, Leibovitz became like an anxious student in the presence of a mentor. She was "just so flattered Sontag was even interested in me at all".
For 15 years, however, the pair were lovers and now, almost four years since Sontag's death from myelogenous leukaemia, a flavour of the writer's influence can be detected in the upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in London, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005. Sontag once told Leibovitz that, as a photographer, she was good, "but you could be better". This show, which first opened in Brooklyn in 2006, could be seen, at least in part, as an attempt to show that she has been better. Better than her huge theatrical productions, such as that of Nicole Kidman, sweeping across a ballroom in a swirling fishtail gown. Better than the baby photographs of the Cruises, Tom and Katie, swooning over their daughter Suri. The name Leibovitz may be synonymous with elaborate Vanity Fair glamour shots, but what few people knew until 2006, was that the artist had also photographed the meat and gristle of life.
Here, in this exhibition and accompanying book, are the blood-stained instruments used in the Caesarean birth of her first child. Here is her father photographed after his death, dressed in pyjamas, head against a flowered pillowcase. Here even are shots of vast landscapes that remind us that humans with all their vanities and vaunting egos are just blips in the calendar of the universe.
This, in many ways, is an exhibition of grief. At the time Leibovitz put it together, she was mourning not only a lover, Sontag, but also her father who had died five weeks beforehand of lung cancer. Intending to produce a small book of photographs for Sontag's memorial service, Leibovitz began searching through the work she had produced during the years the couple had been together (1990-2005). The exercise grew into the Photographer's Life exhibition, which mixes shots from Leibovitz's professional career, with personal images which she considers to be her most important work. "It is the most intimate," she has said, "it tells the best story, and I care about it."
Looking at the photographs, it is clear that the personal work succeeds, not because the images themselves are amazingly composed, framed or lit, but because of their ordinariness. They catalogue the big, yet common experiences: the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, the family holiday, the trials of going through an illness with a lover. They seem real by comparison with the show business of Leibovitz's professional work. What makes these images compelling, however, is that the artist's life story has been far from ordinary.
Born in Connecticut in 1949 into a Jewish family, Leibovitz went on to live an extraordinary life. She and Sontag met when Leibovitz was assigned to take publicity shots for the writer's book, Aids And Its Metaphors. At 51, the photographer had a child using sperm from an anonymous donor and she includes a shot of herself, naked and torpedo-bellied, a day before her Caesarean section. It forms a raw contrast to the famous glossy studio shot of Demi Moore clutching her bump that graced the cover of Vanity Fair. Four years later, Leibovitz had twins, Susan and Samuelle, borne by a surrogate mother. This is a complicated tale of a very modern life.
In some ways, too, it is a coming out. Until the publication of A Photographer's Life, it was widely known that Sontag and Leibovitz, who lived in separate but overlooking apartments in Manhattan, were involved in a relationship, but neither had talked about it: indeed, Sontag was particularly resistant to attempts by lesbian and gay activists to appropriate her romantic life. "Words like companion' and partner' were not in our vocabulary," Leibovitz insisted after Sontag's death. "We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still friend'." Yet, with this exhibition, she explained, "with Susan, it was a love story" and in an interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle, she even said: "Call us lovers'. I like lovers'. You know, lovers' sounds romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love Susan."
Leibovitz has said that in creating this collection, she went through her photographs "as though Susan was behind me and had a say". For anyone who has read Sontag's writings it seems she is there, a ghostly curator, her voice hovering above each of the pictures. We feel her guidance behind the camera, too. There is no doubt that she pushed Leibovitz to do work she would not otherwise have done. The photographer said of Sontag: "She came into my life at the right time. I wanted to do better things, take photographs that matter." Certain shots in A Photographer's Life would not be there, but for Sontag.
Sontag, for instance, made frequent visits to Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict. There, during the siege, she directed a production of Waiting For Godot and persuaded Leibovitz to join her. The result is a collection of photographs which includes Sarajevo: Fallen Bicycle Of A Teenage Boy Just Killed By A Sniper, a chilling shot of a boy's bike collapsed on the ground beside a painterly curl of blood. Leibovitz had witnessed the fatal wounding of a young cyclist on the road in front of her. He died on the way to hospital in her car.
It is known too that Sontag was critical of the celebrity element in Leibovitz's work. Tellingly, when Leibovitz looked at the collection of photographs she had selected for the exhibition, she found the celebrity shots hard to look at.
Yet Sontag herself was a celebrity, and that is part of the reason for the voyeuristic interest in this show. She is the subject of its most intense sequence: of her undergoing chemotherapy and, a final image, after her death, lying on a mortuary gurney, intravenous drip bruises visible in her arms. For some this is a step too far. Sontag's son, David Rieff, who referred in his memoir to "the carnival images of celebrity death", expressed his unhappiness with the exhibiting of the final photograph of his mother. "I think she Leibovitz had a choice. But for whatever purposes it served in her psyche or her career, there was no way I could stop her."
Yet it is possible to imagine Sontag writing a commentary on these works. She had an intense interest in our voyeurism of suffering, and published a selection of essays on the subject. Would she have approved of these photographs? It's hard to say, but certainly those of her illness would provide a riposte to her comment in Regarding The Pain Of Others: "The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. Suffering from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art."
There is a level of intrusion in many of the most compelling of these photographs. It arises not so much from the fact that they were taken, but that they have been published and exhibited.
Particularly difficult are some of those of Leibovitz's family, which show her father lying in death, and her mother, sister and niece grieving on his deathbed. These people were not, like Sontag or Leibovitz, celebrities used to being public property. Her father was a lieutenant colonel in the army, her mother a modern dance teacher. Leibovitz was the third of their six children and much of her early life was spent moving around from base to base, according to where her father was stationed. Her relatives make several appearances in the exhibition, in shots which look not unlike snaps in any family album. One shows her parents on the beach, surrounded by holiday paraphernalia, her mother boldly and exuberantly cocking a leg up in the air in a silly, dancerly pose.
Leibovitz's mother voiced anxieties about the exhibiting of the dead image of her husband, but in the end "let it go". Why did Leibovitz take this shot? It often seems, from her own stories, that she was unable to put down the camera. While giving birth, for instance, she reached up and tried to take a shot of herself from above the curtains. Yet at the same time, it's known that Sontag often scolded Leibovitz for not taking enough off-duty photographs. It's as if she only pushed the lens up between herself and her real life, protectively, when times were tough. Perhaps photographing her father's death was something she needed to do. "You find yourself reverting to what you know," she has said. "It's almost like a protection of some kind. You go back into yourself. You don't really know quite what you're doing. I didn't really analyse it. I felt driven to do it."
Since the exhibition's first showing, she has expressed doubts about having made those images of her family so public. "I realised I'd left them so vulnerable. God knows why you do it, on some level, but it came out of these moments and I won't do it again. I won't touch my family again."
None of these doubts seem to apply to the photographs of Sontag. Shot in black and white, without studio lights, with casual gravity, it's clear she intended these images of her lover, swollen and scarred, to create something important. Indeed, it is as if she remains steadfast to the idea that this is the testimony and tribute the writer might have wanted. "The moment I put this book together," Leibovitz has said, "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."
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Thursday
