Of Greatness and Grief

In 2005, when the American Society of Magazine Editors unveiled "the 40 greatest magazine covers of the last 40 years," they gave first place to a 1980 photograph of Yoko Ono and John Lennon that was taken for Rolling Stone on the day that he was murdered and second place to Vanity Fair's pregnant Demi Moore wearing nothing but diamonds. Leibovitz shot both.

"I'm not a journalist," she writes in the very heavy book that accompanies the Corcoran show. She's being demure. She's been, at times, an ace journalist. When she joined the White House scrum to shoot Richard Nixon's leaving, her photos blew away other coverage of the scene. She was great at O.J. Simpson's trial, too. She doesn't need the studio, the props, the costly setup. Her "Sarajevo: Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed . . . " (1994) -- the fallen bike, the pavement, a crescent smear of blood -- stabs you through the eye.

"He had been hit by a mortar that came down in front of our car," she writes. "I was on my way to a housing project to photograph Miss Sarajevo. We put him in the car, and sent him to the hospital, but he died on the way."

Her exhibition was organized by Charlotta Kotik for the Brooklyn Museum. It will be seen in Paris and in London before its 10-city tour is over. At the Corcoran it closes, rather beautifully, with giant wall-sizelandscapes of the deserts and the waters of God's exalted earth. That's what she is best at, shooting the exalted.

For a while she forgot.

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What cracks her show in half is grief, harrowing grief.

For the 15 years surveyed, the artist shared her life with the writer Susan Sontag, who, after years of sickness (chemo, a mastectomy, ambulances, hospitals, a bone-marrow replacement) died on Dec. 28, 2004.

Sontag was as famous as Leibovitz. She was famous for her brilliance and for being an American version of a Parisian star intellectual, and for the skunk-streak of bright white that ran through her black hair.

"There are beautiful deaths," says Leibovitz. "Susan's death was ghastly. She didn't want to go."

Leibovitz loved her. And watched her unstoppable dying. And then she watched her dad's.

"My father," writes the artist, "had been ill for some time, and I had flown down to Florida to be with him after spending Christmas in the hospital in New York with Susan. She died before I could get back. He died six weeks later."