Essentially Annie

AS she began sifting through an archive of her photographs from the last 15 years, Annie Leibovitz looked into the lens of her life and was startled by what she saw.

On one wall of a barn in upstate New York, she had pinned shots from her magazine assignments -- celebrity portraits that have become icons of American pop culture and have made her one of the world’s best-known photographers. On another wall were more personal pictures, including stark images taken two years ago, when her father and her longtime friend, the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag, both lay dying.

“I was just so overwhelmed by what I was finding in the personal work, because this is who I am,” said Leibovitz, who spent last year sorting through the pictures and has just published a provocative mix of these personal and celebrity shots in “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005.”

The work for Vanity Fair magazine and other publications seemed troublingly formal and less intimate, she said, adding: “I could barely look at the assignment wall.” She’s proud of this work, Leibovitz hastened to add. But, she said ruefully, she wished it “had more meaning. Had more substance.”

That’s a remarkable admission for an artist whose public persona is wrapped up in the high-gloss, high-end celebrity pictures she has taken for nearly 40 years.

Beginning with her photos for Rolling Stone in the 1970s, Leibovitz has produced some of the most memorable images in recent history: a naked John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono, taken hours before he was killed; a naked and very pregnant Demi Moore staring boldly into the camera; Whoopi Goldberg in a tub filled with milk; and most recently, the much ballyhooed photo of Suri Cruise, with her parents, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, on the cover of Vanity Fair.

As she sat in her Greenwich Village office last week, Leibovitz, a tall, imposing woman with long, graying blond hair, struggled to explain her feelings about the photos she decided to turn into a book. She said that death -- and birth -- have changed everything.

The death of Sontag in December 2004, and that of Leibovitz’s father a few weeks later, were followed months later by the births of Leibovitz’s twin daughters, via a surrogate mother. Leibovitz, who is unmarried, had become pregnant with donated sperm with her oldest daughter in 2001, when she was 51.

Silence briefly filled the room when she suggested that people should experience death earlier, so they would know how important it is to show kindness to one another. Had she any regrets in her own life? Leibovitz left the question dangling, brushed her hair back and changed the subject.

“It’s great to stop every 15 to 20 years and take a look at the work you have, and I didn’t have a clue this time about how much of the personal work I really had,” she said quietly. “These pictures are based on relationships and have time invested in them.”

Leibovitz called such photos “reportage,” saying she had taken them spontaneously, reacting to life as it happens. In her book, the images also include scenes of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war -- including a child’s bicycle smashed on a blood-smeared pavement -- and images of the still-smoldering World Trade Center.

But it’s the pictures of Sontag that stand out. “A Photographer’s Life” begins with a 1990 image of the writer, staring into the light from a darkened chasm in Jordan. The book goes on to chronicle Leibovitz’s years with Sontag, whom she met in the late 1980s.

Despite rumors that they were intimately involved, Leibovitz has long called Sontag a friend, resisting terms like “companion” or “partner.”

The good times -- trips abroad, life at home in their neighboring New York apartments -- give way to pictures of Sontag’s grueling bout with cancer in 1998, which she survived, and her last struggle.

A grief-stricken Leibovitz took only a few pictures of the writer’s last days. The overall effect is to show Sontag’s slow transformation from a vital, outspoken person into a weary, exhausted patient.

Leibovitz consulted with Sontag’s family and those close to the writer, including her literary agent, Andrew Wylie, before including the pictures in her book.

“There were a lot of discussions” about using the material, she said, choosing her words carefully and declining to be more specific.

“That was probably the most difficult decision for me, to go ahead. Susan was very private. I wouldn’t even be looking at these pictures if she didn’t die. But she’s dead,” Leibovitz said, her voice quavering. “I think she would love it. She’d be very proud of it.... She would have been proud of me.”

Leibovitz said Sontag was often critical of her, urging her to be more daring. She could be contemptuous of the celebrity culture that gave Leibovitz a successful, and lucrative, career. But whenever the photographer threatened to abandon such high-gloss work, she recalled that Sontag would chide her: “She’d say, ‘Stop complaining! You know you’re not going to leave this!’ And she’s right.”

Born in Connecticut, Leibovitz migrated to the Bay Area in the late 1960s and enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute. At a friend’s urging, she submitted a photograph she had taken of an anti-Vietnam War demonstration to Rolling Stone and was elated when the magazine used it for a June 1970 cover.

Her career quickly took off, and Leibovitz gained national prominence with her pictures from the Rolling Stones’ 1975 tour. She moved to Vanity Fair in 1983, and her celebrity cover shots quickly became the stuff of national conversation.

Unlike legendary photographer Richard Avedon, who shot VIPs against austere backgrounds, Leibovitz typically captured her subjects in a highly staged and humorous or theatrical situation.

She persuaded comedian Chris Rock to pose in minstrel white-face; she got Roseanne Barr to mud wrestle for the camera. These pictures cemented her reputation, but Leibovitz concedes that America’s veneration of celebrities -- a trend that rapidly accelerated in the ‘80s and ‘90s -- is now out of control.

The high-concept pictures she prefers are less in favor these days, because editors just want shots of famous people. The nude Demi Moore shot might not be accepted for Vanity Fair now, she joked, because advertisers want credits for clothing and jewelry on the cover.

“The culmination of all this was the bounty put on Suri’s head, the rush to get that photograph,” the photographer said, groaning at the spectacle of media helicopters circling over Tom Cruise’s home, and the hysterical fuss over the new family member. “That stuff is very strange to me,” she said.

Leibovitz’s calendar is jammed with upcoming celebrity shoots in New York, Los Angeles and other cities. A retrospective of her work is set to open soon at the Brooklyn Museum; it will move early next year to the San Diego Museum of Art, and also Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

In January, PBS will air an “American Masters” documentary about her life and work.

She’s busier than ever. But there’s a vague air of regret as Leibovitz climbs into a waiting SUV and heads for a shoot of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and author Kurt Andersen; a sense that, as the celebrity train chugs on with Leibovitz aboard, her heart is somewhere else.

Unlike Sontag’s traumatic passing, Leibovitz said, “My father’s death was really different -- it was such a beautiful death.” Samuel Leibovitz, 91, died at home in his wife’s arms, in the bed they shared for 60 years.

The next afternoon, Leibovitz took a picture of her sister and niece comforting her mother in that sad, rumpled bed.

“It was so intensely personal,” she said. “I wish I could do more work like that.”

josh.getlin@latimes.com

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Local appearances

Where: Los Angeles Central Library, 630 W. 5th St., L.A.

When: 7 p.m., Oct. 30

Contact: (213) 228-7000

Also

Where: Borders, 1360 Westwood Blvd., L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Nov. 16

Contact: (310) 475-3444

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On the Web

To see images from Annie Leibovitz’s new book, view our online photo gallery at latimes.com/leibovitz.