A Complete Picture

"It's the closest thing to who I am that I've ever done."

'We Are So Complicated'

Who she is this day, on the surface at least, is a nearly 6-foot-tall, 57-year-old whirlwind wearing jeans, hiking boots and a black V-neck top over a green tee. She carries herself with the confidence of a strong woman used to lugging heavy camera equipment through five-star hotels.

She's a bit less confident with words, at least those intended for publication, though part of that may be that she's worn out from being asked to emote on cue. "I'm learning not to say everything," she says.

A minute later, she tells a story about how Sontag -- a renowned essayist and novelist who was nothing if not ferociously verbal -- once gave her brief delusions of writerly grandeur.

It seems that Leibovitz's iconic photograph of a naked John Lennon curled in the fetal position beside Yoko Ono had been removed, at the last minute, from a Los Angeles show. Sontag wrote a paragraph on censorship that Leibovitz released as a statement. The Los Angeles Times then asked the photographer for an op-ed.

"I thought about it for a minute and I said, 'Yeah!' " recalls Leibovitz, laughing. Fortunately, she came to her senses in time.

She was an Air Force brat, repeatedly changing home towns until the family settled in Silver Spring for her high school years. At the San Francisco Art Institute, in the late '60s, she began studying photography. A boyfriend told her she should go work for Rolling Stone.

The rest is magazine history: Leibovitz starred at RS until 1983, when she moved on to help revive Vanity Fair.

An interviewer for a German magazine once suggested that a Leibovitz portrait captures "the essence of a person." Bull, the photographer countered. "We are so complicated -- we have so many sides, but that's the fun of it: 'Which side shall we deal with today?' "

On the evidence of her connection with the famously intellectual Sontag, she's a good deal more complicated herself than a stereotype like "imagemaker to the rich and fabulous" might suggest.

The two women met in the late 1980s, when Leibovitz did some publicity shots for one of Sontag's books. They shared a love of travel, both the adventurous and the luxurious kind. "A Photographer's Life" opens with a shot of Sontag at Petra, a stunning ancient site in Jordan. In Venice, a frequent destination, Sontag took the frames of Leibovitz that ended up on the book's cover. And without the writer's energetic activism, the photographer would never have made it to besieged Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1993-94 -- where, telling herself at first that she was qualified only to shoot portraits, she ended up with some striking reportage.

"When I met Susan, how could I not imagine that it was this opportunity for the work," Leibovitz says. Here was the author of "On Photography" telling Leibovitz she was good but could be better. "That was just raising the bar for me."