A Complete Picture

The Stern Portfolio became "the bible for this book." In a barn at her country home in Rhinebeck, N.Y., she created a wall of personal work and another wall of assignment work, ready to be culled and combined.

Then she asked Mark Holborn for help.

Holborn is an editor of visual arts books who'd worked with the likes of painter Lucian Freud and photographer Richard Avedon. On the phone from London, he talks about what he and Leibovitz did over the course of a few days in August 2005.

The scale of the project was thrilling, he says, like doing a big-budget movie when you're used to artsy, low-budget films. "You can build something of far greater complexity. You can have flashbacks. There's room for multilayering to take place."

Beyond that, there was the extraordinary range of Leibovitz's work:

"You've got these raw personal documents from life, then some of the most expensive pictures ever made." You've got a black-and-white world of reportage and a color world "where everyone is performing."

What happens when you edit them into a whole? Holborn explains:

An early decision was to use Leibovitz's evocative landscape photographs -- which she loved, but about which she was insecure -- to introduce, pace and end the book.

After the initial landscapes, "you go straight into your mum and dad on the beach -- as ordinary as you can imagine." Ordinary things then happen, "but the ordinary things are epic: Parents die, babies are born, lovers die."

It could be anyone's story, anybody's family album. Ah, but then you inject "Bush, Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nelson Mandela." Leibovitz's personal narrative, Holborn says, is populated "by people who populate all our lives."

The public/private contrast can be jarring, of course. But even within the public portraits, the sequencing can startle.

Here's Mandela, one of the great men of the 20th century. Turn the page and you get Mick Jagger shirtless on a bed, posing like a pretty girl. "The juxtaposition is shocking," Holborn says.