Okay, so I not-so-secretly in love with Annie Leibovitz glamor shots for Vanity Fair, and while I may quibble about her recent overuse of superimposed images (see the Queen's portrait in front of a lake), I still find the productions quite beautiful.
But when I recently came across her book A Photographer's Life 1990-2005, those weren't the ones that touched me. Instead, it was her openness of her life rather than her work that piqued my interest. These collected photos stopped becoming a portfolio, and started telling a story-- not even that, but more of a diary. Her love and infatuation with Susan Sontag comes across the everyday, unflattering images she captured of Sontag on a nearly daily basis, from the normal half-awake mornings, to cancer treatments, to Sontag's funeral. All of this is distilled throughout the book, in between notes of family portraits and of magazine shoots, and it's highly emotional. I highly recommend picking up this book.
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