High Regard: Words and Pictures in Tribute to Susan Sontag

Abstract

Susan Sontag s death on December 28, 2004, was marked, unsurprisingly, by an immediate outpouring of thoughtful memoirs and obituaries. Turning from words to pictures, surprising tributes came later: Annie Leibovitz's Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, and last year's Metropolitan Museum of Art show, On Photography: Tribute to Susan Sontag, which ran from June 6 to September 4, 2006. Leibovitz's book opens with a picture of Sontag, back to camera, dwarfed by rock walls of Petra but emerging into white open space before temple. Leibovitz explains that she came across photograph while searching through her files for pictures to include in a booklet she was making for Sontag's memorial service. Encountering pictures she had taken in their fifteen years together, Leibovitz ended up with a book in addition to memorial booklet. Although book follows time line implied by title, with her opening picture, Leibovitz breaks chronology for Sontag's sake. She justifies exception by explaining that the picture sounds themes of death and grief that wind through book, but it also captures Sontag's appetite for experience.1 Metropolitan Museum curator Mia Fineman in turn visited Leibovitz's studio before book was finished and chose this same photograph to include as last image to exhibit (fig.l). (Leibovitz donated it to museum.)2 In contrast to Leibovitz's factual caption (Susan Sontag, Petra, Jordan, 1994) and intimate narrative, wall text in Metropolitan's exhibition gives theory: A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of vanished past are incitements to reverie. Quoted from Sontag's On Photography? this wall text, like all texts in exhibit, was selected by curator Fineman from Sontag's repertoire of writings on photography.