“A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?”

Those are the first words of Susan Sontag’s essay on women and photography, written especially for this book. I was hesitant to read the essay after having read a few of the dismal essays she wrote on the subject of photography in her 1988 monograph, On Photography. But the power and versatility I’d witnessed in Annie Leibovitz’s covers for Rolling Stone and her pictures of celebrities overpowered any questions or doubts I may have had about the content of the book.

Inside, a plethora of photographs dazzle the eye, from celebrities to coal miners, astronauts, farmers, Las Vegas show-girls, authors, dancers and reporters. Every walk of life is shown in this book.

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Sontag’s essay is about the “new possibilities” of Women and how it “[features] many portraits of those who are a credit to their sex.”

In one of my favorite parts of the essay, she quotes a long passage from Wilkie Collins’s “robustly, enthrallingly clever bestseller,” The Woman in White as a representation of the idea that beauty and intelligence do not equate in Victorian sensibility. The passage from The Woman in White, roughly summed up, talks of Marian Halcombe as “ugly” stating, “…never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it.”

Sontag goes on to say that she believes the narrator was disgusted with Marian not because of her face, but by the words that came out of her mouth. Because she is intelligent, she is considered “ugly”.

She has an interesting view of the subject of women, men and intelligence:

“The contradiction in the order of sexual stereotypes may seem dreamlike to a well-adjusted inhabitant of an era in which action, enterprise, artistic creativity, and intellectual innovation are understood to be masculine, fraternal orders. For a long time the beauty of a woman seemed incompatible, or at least oddly matched, with intelligence and assertiveness. (A far greater novelist [than Collins], Henry James, in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, speaks of the challenge of filling the “frail vessel” of a female protagonist with all the richness of an independent consciousness.) To be sure, no novelist today would find it implausible to award good looks to a woman who has both beauty and intellectual brilliance…”

Sontag’s essay provides a deeper meaning to Leibovitz’s photographs.

Sontag asks several rhetorical questions of the reader. In fact, the essay can be read as one, long rhetorical question. However, the essay does inform as well as ask. Sontag’s subjects include The Woman in White, Henry James, early American photography and Greta Garbo. The essay leaves one with the urge to know more, which is always a delightful feeling.

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While Sontag’s essay is a wonderful piece, it is Leibovitz and her camera that make the book worthwhile. The pictures are beautiful and amazing portraits of women, both old and young. Many of the pictures are shot in black and white.

There are two very vivid pictures of women in shelters. Both women are victims of abuse. One woman’s lips are broken and look as though they were still bleeding when the photograph was taken. The other has her right eye so swollen that it appears to be a blind eye, with no color in it. The two photographs combine Leibovitz’s style with that of Diane Arbus to make two haunting portraits.

Amongst the images of day-to-day people, there is always a celebrity or two. Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner hug in a wonderful mother/daughter picture. Nicole Kidman sits on the side of a bed in an under-lit room in a haunting portrait. Writer Eudora Welty poses in a large yellow coat that seems to swallow her up. Frances McDormand glares at the camera as if she’s just been stopped by the paparazzi. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem leans back in a pick-up truck. Noble Laureate Toni Morrison looks out at the grey clouds as if she were thinking over the next crucial scene in one of her brilliant novels.

The everyday pictures are beautiful images too. There is a picture of a waitress who looks oddly like a Lucille Ball impersonator. Another picture is of a maid standing in the hallway of the hotel where she works. A small series of photos shows Las Vegas showgirls making a transformation, showing them first with their gaudy outfits and then in their day clothes, with little to no makeup, with their families.

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Leibovitz has the ability to transcend physical beauty into the soul of the subject. All of her pictures reveal something formerly secret in the subject, something that was undetected and unnoticed until the day she came along with her camera. And for that, we should all be grateful.

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