My time with Susan
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
Saturday October 7, 2006
The Guardian
'The closest word is still "friend"'... Annie Leibovitz on Susan
Sontag. Photograph: Michael Probst/AP
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.
Article continues 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.
·
A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005, by Annie Leibovitz, will be published by
Jonathan Cape on October 19 at £60. To order a copy for £48,
with free mainland UK p&p, call 0870 836 0875.
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