A Complete Picture

Other shocks come from the mere passage of time.

Check out Leibovitz's group portrait of the Washington powers that be, as of December 2001. George W. Bush is flanked by Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Andrew Card, George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld.

Everyone looks serious, confident and in charge.

Then there's the bleak, black-and-white shot, dated 2002, that includes the husband-and-wife writing team of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

Two years later, Dunne would be gone. A year after that, Didion would publish "The Year of Magical Thinking," a controlled yet emotional meditation on intimacy and death. Around the same time, Leibovitz -- whom Didion says she's known since the photographer was 19 -- would ask her to look at the dummies of "A Photographer's Life."

Leibovitz showed the book to others close to Sontag, too. "I think what I was looking for," she says, was "just whether or not it was okay" to publish something so personal about someone who was gone.

Didion looked, and then said yes, it was.

"A lot of people have expressed to me that they wouldn't have written about John the way I did," Didion says. But she thinks her husband would have given his okay.

And she thinks that Sontag, whom she also knew and loved, would have approved of what Leibovitz has done.

'Like Life Itself'

"I know what that is. That's just cockiness. That's, like, silliness," the photographer is saying.

The page she's looking at shows Leibovitz herself, half-naked, shooting self-portraits in a hotel mirror. She'd always wanted to try one "out of the shower, my hair pulled back," she explains, "but I had a 35-millimeter lens on and I ended up shooting a little more than my head."

Okay. But cockiness is part of what makes her successful, right? She's not afraid to throw herself into any situation?

"I don't know. I come from a big family of boisterous, loud people and used to think if you're loved as a child or something, you feel a little more comfortable."

Flip, flip, flip. There's no time to pause at every photograph and at times they begin to blur. Sometimes the blur is like a Leibovitz home movie, frames zipping by too fast for you to pick out individual sisters and aunts. Sometimes it's a montage of the pop culture dreamscape, a world where we're invited to call everyone -- Bruce, Hillary, Quentin, Vanessa, Nicole, Susan -- by their first names.

The book "was so full of everything," Didion says, recalling her first impressions. "It was like life itself. You don't separate out the performance aspect of life from the private aspect of life; they all come out of you at once."

Yet there are hints that Leibovitz is tiring of the performance part.

Over and over, with slight variations in the wording, she's been telling interviewers: This is the best work I've ever done. It's clear she doesn't mean the nude shots of Demi Moore.

Now, as the pages go on turning, she talks about wanting to do more landscape work, about wishing there were more outlets for photographic reportage. "I'm really astounded at the reaction to the book," she says. "It's such a beautiful thing. I can't publish that work in magazines."

Holborn thinks he understands her dilemma. "When your arena is the cover of Vanity Fair," he says, "you're bound to question whether that's at odds with the possibility of being an artist."

"A Photographer's Life" is replete with portraits of older creative types, many now gone: Richard Avedon, Johnny Cash, Philip Johnson, Sontag. Leibovitz admires those who "continue to evolve as they get older, who are graceful in their aging and incorporate their knowledge."

Art, life, death, survival -- there's much more to talk about here. But the interview's in overtime already. Time to move ahead to the book's concluding images: mostly elegiac landscapes, with one final shot of Sontag, ascending Mount Vesuvius.

But wait. "It's not quite the ending -- there are some more babies coming!" Leibovitz exclaims.

Sure enough, you were going to flip right by those shots of her twin girls being born, to a surrogate mother, in May 2005.

She'd had her first daughter 4 1/2 years earlier. She'd loved and been loved by her own large, loud family.

Now she wanted life, in all its boisterous bigness, to go on.