They tore down the divide between Ms. Leibovitz’s photographs that had been taken on assignment and her personal images, interweaving them in one narrative spanning 15 years in the world and her life. She was just this charming, beautiful child inside. One of her most famous works, however, was not a book, but an essay, "Notes on Camp," published in 1964 and still widely read. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. Out of her experience came "Illness as Metaphor," which examined the cultural mythologizing of disease (tuberculosis as the illness of 19th-century romantics, cancer a modern-day scourge). Susan Sontag’s 2004 death from Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) is routinely addressed in publications on Sontag’s oeuvre and the Medical Humanities at large, mostly through reference to two texts: Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005 (2006), which alongside some of Leibovitz’s By that stage, late 2004, she was shuttling between Sontag's bedside and that of her desperately ill father in Florida. It is good for the digestion.". [60] In 1983 she became the first contributing photographer for Vanity Fair. Ms. Sontag would eventually reconsider her position in the 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism.". "Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! You don’t really know quite what you’re doing. The collection interweaves the professional and the personal, the public and private, in startling ways. That's why even if one disagrees with it -- as I did frequently -- it was unusually stimulating. You must take care of them.” But when she began sorting through 15 years of magazine assignment photos and personal photography in August 2005 for a book she had long ago promised her publisher, the personal pictures were the ones that captivated her. Her father was a fur trader in China, and her mother joined him there for long periods, leaving Susan and her younger sister in the care of relatives. Ms. Sontag was the subject of an unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, "Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon" (Norton, 2000), and of several critical studies, including "Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me," by Craig Seligman (Counterpoint/Perseus, 2004). But in 1982 she delivered a stinging blow to progressives in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan. For four decades, Susan Sontag's books were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (Ms. Leibovitz introduces the fact of her relationship with Ms. Sontag as an aside, in a dependent clause: “who was with me during the years the book encompasses.”) Now the book is coming out, and she is called upon to talk. There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.". The pair never spoke publicly of their relationship although after Sontag's death in 2004 Leibovitz described it as a "love story". There are photographs of her parents, her siblings, a flock of nieces and nephews on the beach; of room-service breakfast with Ms. Sontag at the Gritti Palace in Venice; of her parents, asleep in bed, elbows akimbo and pillows askew, a small grandson sandwiched in between. She never took a lot of personal photos; she would throw a few rolls in a box, let them go undeveloped for months. Miniature versions of 'Don Giovanni' and 'Tosca' lie embedded, like jewels, in the main narrative; and we are given as well some charmingly acute cameos of such historical figures as Goethe and the King and Queen of Naples.". That exercise turned into what she has described as an archeological dig: an unearthing and sifting of a decade and a half of work, love, family life, illness, deaths and births, adding up to “my most important work,” she said in an interview this week. Oct. 6, 2006 IN the days after the death of Susan Sontag in December 2004, Annie Leibovitz began searching for photographs for a small book to be given out at … She started with other people’s photographs of Ms. Sontag, then turned to her own, taken during the 15 years they spent together. “I just wanted to be there. “I found myself totally taken over by the personal work,” she said. Novels The Benefactor (1963) Death Kit (1967) The Volcano Lover (1992) In America (2000), Nonfiction Against Interpretation (1966) Styles of Radical Will (1969) On Photography (1977) Illness As Metaphor (1978) AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). “You saw their backs. Also surviving is her younger sister, Judith Cohen of Maui. A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960's, Ms. Sontag wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. She also edited works by Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Danilo Kis and other writers. She showed you things you hadn't seen before; she had a way of reopening questions.". It isn't what I feel. She began work on a Ph.D., but did not complete her dissertation. After Sontag's death, Newsweek published an article about Annie Leibovitz that made clear references to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating that they "first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. “Every single image that one would have a possible problem with or have concerns about, I had them too. “I have to save some of it for myself. She wanted to do more. Ms. Leibovitz took several months off to be with her. Ms. Sontag's work made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She was 71. Susan Sontag Isabelle Huppert Japanese Literature Hbo Documentaries France Culture Feminist Icons Beloved Book So Little Time Lesbian. “I had great respect and admiration for her, and I wanted to make everything possible for her, whatever she needed. She scoured the literature for a treatment that might save her, underwent a mastectomy and persuaded her doctors to give her a two-and-a-half-year course of radiation. After graduating from high school, Ms. Sontag spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which she received a bachelor's degree in 1951. In "AIDS and Its Metaphors" Ms. Sontag discussed the social implications of the disease, which she viewed as a "cultural plague" that had replaced cancer as the modern bearer of stigma. “With my parents it was the relationship of a lifetime. She had such delight with life and everything.” Ms. Sontag told her, she said, that as a photographer, “you’re good but you could be better.” Ms. Leibovitz wanted to be better. She’s gone back to the support of her sisters.”, The book and the exhibition end with landscapes, images of Monument Valley, the Hudson, the view from Ms. Leibovitz’s apartment in Manhattan toward Ms. Sontag’s after snow. Seeking relief for Susan's asthma, her mother moved the family to Tucson, spending the next several years there. An 11-page introduction grew out of several months of conversations with Ms. Delano. Taken on December 8, 1980, Leibovitz’s Polaroid of the former Beatle was shot just hours before his death. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. I had the very same problems, and I needed to go through it. At Chicago she wandered into a class taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, who would write the celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking, 1959). And I mean working every single day. Her broad back is turned. In a 1992 interview with The Times Magazine, Ms. Sontag described the creative force that animated "The Volcano Lover," putting her finger on the sensibility that would inform all her work: "I don't want to express alienation. I helped her get her driver’s license. An editor, Sharon Delano, convinced her that “it was important to explain myself, and explain myself once,” Ms. Leibovitz said. Little seems to have been held back. I've looked at these books. That book's title essay, in which she argued that art should be experienced viscerally rather than cerebrally, helped cement her reputation as a champion of style over content. She helped her financially, she says, making it possible for Ms. Sontag to stop doing lectures and concentrate on writing fiction. Interviewed for The Times article, Ms. Sontag defended her method. THE death of Annie Leibovitzs partner is the focus of a new exhibition. Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71. Susan Sontag – Death Kit. Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences -- … "She found in camp an aesthetic that was very different from what the straight world had acknowledged up to that point, and she managed to make camp 'straight' in a way," Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia and the art critic for The Nation, said yesterday in a telephone interview. Leibovitz's great regret is that she wasn't there when Sontag died. It had evolved into acute myelogenous leukaemia. For Susan, who graduated from high school before her 16th birthday, the philistinism of American culture was a torment she vowed early to escape. Twin girls Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother in May 2005. “It’s just, life goes on. They met in the late 1980’s when Ms. Leibovitz was asked to make some publicity photos in connection with the release of Ms. Sontag’s book, “AIDS and Its Metaphors.” As a student she had read “On Photography,” in which Ms. Sontag wrote, among many other things, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” But she talked to Ms. Sontag about “The Benefactor,” her first novel, which Ms. Leibovitz loved. Leibovitz has three daughters. And I made the decision in the long run that the strength of the book needed those pictures, and that the fact that it came out of a moment of grief gave the work dignity.”, “You don’t get the opportunity to do this kind of intimate work except with the people you love, the people who will put up with you,” Ms. Leibovitz said, speaking not just of Ms. Sontag but of her parents, her children, her five brothers and sisters, who she says became one another’s best friends, growing up in a military family perpetually on the move. “The early pictures of her riding the bike, when she had her bike. “I didn’t want to be there as a photographer,” she said. “I love that picture,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “In the long run I don’t think this book is helped by talking about it,” she said. It’s such a totally different story that she is dead. "I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them. Interviewed in The Times Magazine in 1992, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes compared Ms. Sontag to the Renaissance humanist Erasmus. There are photographs of that period too, of Ms. Sontag receiving chemotherapy, having her hair cut. Some regarded her tendency to revisit her earlier, often controversial positions as ambivalent. As The Times reported in May 2000, a reader identified at least a dozen passages as being similar to those in four other books about the real Modjeska, including Modjeska's memoirs. “One doesn’t stop framing. She would return to the subject of AIDS in her acclaimed short story "The Way We Live Now," originally published in The New Yorker and included in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). There are photographs of Mrs. Leibovitz, in July 2005, with her two sisters, eating outdoors in Rhinebeck, a cane across her lap, a small camera in hand. “They’re all totally out of focus and terrible,” she laughed. A year earlier, when Ms. Sontag became ill for the final time, Ms. Leibovitz stopped shooting. Though "In America" received a National Book Award, critical reception was mixed. The introduction is a gem of lucidity and understatement. She gave people a vocabulary for talking about it and thinking about it.". “You find yourself reverting to what you know,” she said. Ms. Sontag, who died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for the last 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor" (1978). This wasn’t like a flippant thing. She would weep for 10 minutes, then return to the photographs. She had more books she wanted to write. ", The Washington Post Book World called "On Photography" "a brilliant analysis," adding that it " merely describes a phenomenon we take as much for granted as water from the tap, and how that phenomenon has changed us -- a remarkable enough achievement, when you think about it.". Suddenly, that photograph has a story. What are your thoughts about the pictures of Susan Sontag? After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she wrote in The New Yorker, "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." She resisted including an introduction; the photographs were “a small movie,” she said; they should speak for themselves. And there is previously unseen “personal reportage” on her big and exuberant family, her parents, her life with Ms. Sontag, the births of her three daughters, Ms. Sontag’s illnesses and death, and the death of Ms. Leibovitz’s father six weeks later. Though this label was never bestowed on her, I’d say she was also one of our most famous single mothers. Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels "Death Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover" (1992) and "In America" (2000); the essay collections "Against Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will" (1969) and "Under the Sign of Saturn" (1980); the critical studies "On Photography" (1977) and "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989); and the short-story collection "I, Etcetera" (1978). I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate. I never stop framing and it is a way of hiding behind something as a protection as she states. In 1998 Ms. Sontag received a diagnosis of cancer, from which she recovered. She appears often in a bathing suit and in the presence of water: a stocky figure wading into the surf, grandchild in tow. In Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. She shot the famous 1991 cover photograph of Demi Moore, naked and pregnant. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad. She laughed readily, and when she discussed something that engaged her passionately (and there were many things), her dark eyes often filled with tears. "I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said in a 1992 interview. I mean, she would champion this work.”, Ms. Leibovitz herself seems ambivalent about how much to surrender. I just tried to create an honest work that had all those things in it.”, From Annie Leibovitz: Life, and Death, Examined, Annie Leibovitz preparing her show at the Brooklyn Museum, which is to open Oct. 20. Turning from words to pictures, the surprising tributes came later: Annie Leibovitz's book, A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, and last year's Metropolitan Museum of Art “She was actually a very warm, outgoing person, the opposite of what you sort of expected — just so charming, even childlike in some ways,” Ms. Leibovitz said. (Ms. Sontag once remarked that she could appreciate Patti Smith because she had read Nietzsche.). “I think she came into my life at the right time,” she said. They met in 1989, when both had already established notability in their careers. Mr. Rieff lives in Manhattan and was for many years his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her first, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz was born in October 2001 when Leibovitz was 52 years old. In the essay "On Style," published in the same volume, Ms. Sontag offended many readers by upholding the films of Leni Riefenstahl as masterworks of aesthetic form, with little regard for their content. I knew she was probably dying.” Ms. Leibovitz had Ms. Sontag flown by air ambulance from Seattle back to New York. She worked as an editor at Commentary and juggled teaching jobs at City College, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. "I think she prepared the ground for the pop revolution, which was in many ways essentially a gay revolution, through Warhol and others. However, it was never disclosed whether their 15-year relationship was a platonic or romantic relationship, because they never actually lived together. She published her first essays, critical celebrations of modernists she admired, as well as her first novel, "The Benefactor" (1963), an exploration of consciousness and dreams. But it is the photographs of Ms. Sontag, taken in a hospital room at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle a month earlier, barely recognizable but unmistakably dying, that Ms. Leibowitz says proved the most contentious in conversations with friends and family about making the pictures public. Asked about the placement of the final images, Ms. Leibovitz said, “It’s a way of moving out of the story, it’s a way of going back into the earth.”. With "Notes on Camp" Ms. Sontag fired a shot across the bow of the New York critical establishment, which included eminences like Lionel and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. I felt like a person who is taking care of a great monument.”, Another person who emerges vividly from the photographs is Ms. Leibovitz’s mother, Marilyn, whom she describes as exuberant and creative, the kind of mother your friends like but you find occasionally embarrassing as a child. If that essay has today lost its capacity to shock, it is a reflection of how thoroughly Ms. Sontag did her job, serving as a guide to an underground aesthetic that was not then widely known. Susan Sontag's final wish She wanted hope, a reason to believe she would survive cancer. I said, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ Because I realized she couldn’t really drive. I think it was a very brave and courageous year of her life.”. The couple were married -- Susan took her stepfather's name -- and the family moved to Los Angeles. Annie Leibovitz was in a relationship with writer Susan Sontag from 1989 until Sontag ’s death in 2004. – Nancy K. Miller (Bequest & Betrayal, 1996a: iv). He was, she would say, the first person with whom she could really talk; they were married 10 days later. "Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing," he said. Ms. Sontag had a knack -- or perhaps a penchant -- for getting into trouble. Her husband, Samuel, sits, at a tiny table, his back turned too. She could be provocative to the point of being inflammatory, as when she championed the Nazi-era filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in a 1965 essay; she would revise her position some years later. She was 71. Annie Leibovitz. She photographed her father after his death in 2005. She did not want to die. Though she thought of herself as a novelist, it was through her essays that Ms. Sontag became known. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. And with my children it’s the future. The article made Ms. Sontag an international celebrity, showered with lavish, if unintentionally ridiculous, titles ("a literary pinup," "the dark lady of American letters," "the Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant-garde"). ... Until the death of the writer they remained in a very close and trusting relationship – together with Zontag photographer published an album “Women”, in which portraits of celebrities interspersed with images of ordinary American women. She wrote serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema and science fiction, that earlier critics disdained. Her work, with its emphasis on the outré, the jagged and the here and now, helped make the study of popular culture a respectable academic pursuit. Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. “It’s the most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”. An example of Annie Leibovitz’s “personal reportage”: her parents with their grandson Ross in 1992. 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