In recent years a steady stream of writers have reconsidered her life and legacy: Terry Castle’s 2005 London Review of Books essay “Desperately Seeking Susan”; the 2008 memoir Swimming in a Sea of Death, a narrative of Sontag’s torturous final years by her son, David Rieff; the novelist Sigrid Nunez’s memoir Sempre Susan; and the 2014 HBO documentary Regarding Susan Sontag. It told the story of Sir William Hamilton, the 18th-century British envoy to the court of Naples; his wife, Emma ("that Hamilton woman"); and her lover, Lord Nelson, the naval hero. The still smoking World Trade Center ruins have been juxtaposed with a shot, by Ms. Sontag, of Ms. Leibovitz, naked three weeks later, on the day before she goes in for a Caesarean section. Susan Sontag Isabelle Huppert Japanese Literature Hbo Documentaries France Culture Feminist Icons Beloved Book So Little Time Lesbian. Susan Sontag, the “Dark Lady” of American intellectual life for over four decades, has died of cancer. The representation of her death, by a final bout of cancer that had intermittently afflicted her throughout adult life, was by her lover, Annie Leibovitz. In "AIDS and Its Metaphors" Ms. Sontag discussed the social implications of the disease, which she viewed as a "cultural plague" that had replaced cancer as the modern bearer of stigma. She had a very slim chance of the bone-marrow transplant working. “I think she came into my life at the right time,” she said. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad. Some branded Ms. Sontag an unoriginal thinker, a popularizer with a gift for aphorism who could boil down difficult writers for mass consumption. Mr. Rieff lives in Manhattan and was for many years his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Ms. Sontag's other work includes the play "Alice in Bed" (1993); "A Susan Sontag Reader" (1982), with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick; and four films, including "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) and "Brother Carl" (1971). I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate. Laid out on a hospital gurney, broken, her hair white again and chewed down, all the legendary beauty had gone. They met in the late 1980’s when Ms. Leibovitz was asked to make some publicity photos in connection with the release of Ms. Sontag’s book, “AIDS and Its Metaphors.” As a student she had read “On Photography,” in which Ms. Sontag wrote, among many other things, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” But she talked to Ms. Sontag about “The Benefactor,” her first novel, which Ms. Leibovitz loved. She would return to the subject of AIDS in her acclaimed short story "The Way We Live Now," originally published in The New Yorker and included in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). An example of Annie Leibovitz’s “personal reportage”: her parents with their grandson Ross in 1992. She published painstaking critical dissections of photography and dance; illness, politics and pornography; and, most famously, camp. She wanted to do more. “In the long run I don’t think this book is helped by talking about it,” she said. But in 1982 she delivered a stinging blow to progressives in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan. The couple shared a close relationship for fifteen years prior to Sontag’s death, only after which reference was made to it not being merely platonic. Though she thought of herself as a novelist, it was through her essays that Ms. Sontag became known. But she could also be warm and girlish, speaking confidingly in her rich, low voice, her feet propped casually on the nearest coffee table. You must take care of them.” But when she began sorting through 15 years of magazine assignment photos and personal photography in August 2005 for a book she had long ago promised her publisher, the personal pictures were the ones that captivated her. “I worry about talking about it. There are photographs of that period too, of Ms. Sontag receiving chemotherapy, having her hair cut. No one ever called her dull. Ms. Leibovitz, who is 57, made her name in the 1970’s and early 1980’s as chief photographer for Rolling Stone, shooting musicians and others in provocative poses, like John Lennon, naked and pink, curled around Yoko Ono, fully clothed in black, just hours before he was killed. She shot the famous 1991 cover photograph of Demi Moore, naked and pregnant. Although Ms. Sontag was strongly identified with the American left during the Vietnam era, in later years her politics were harder to classify. ", The Washington Post Book World called "On Photography" "a brilliant analysis," adding that it " merely describes a phenomenon we take as much for granted as water from the tap, and how that phenomenon has changed us -- a remarkable enough achievement, when you think about it.". "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on refinement," Ms. Sontag wrote. To many critics, her work was bold and thrilling. In 1983 she became the first contributing photographer for Vanity Fair. “Some of it must have been I was just so flattered she was even interested in me at all. “I found myself totally taken over by the personal work,” she said. Ms. Sontag was the subject of an unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, "Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon" (Norton, 2000), and of several critical studies, including "Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me," by Craig Seligman (Counterpoint/Perseus, 2004). Her most recent book, published last year, was "Regarding the Pain of Others," a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. "Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing," he said. Word swept around campus that Dr. Rieff had married a 14-year-old American Indian. Ms. Leibovitz bought an apartment in Paris; she wanted Ms. Sontag to have something she had always wanted. The stories it charts include her relationship with Susan Sontag, then Sontag's death and her father passing away." He was, she would say, the first person with whom she could really talk; they were married 10 days later. Interviewed for The Times article, Ms. Sontag defended her method. “I have to save some of it for myself. Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1933, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. He was 91, had lung cancer and had driven a car until a week before. She wanted to live. She was just this charming, beautiful child inside. In the mid-1970's Ms. Sontag learned she had breast cancer. It’s on all the time.” In the middle of her Caesarean in 2001 she reached up with a camera to try to shoot the birth of her daughter, Sarah, over the curtain suspended across her midriff. Ms. Sontag had a knack -- or perhaps a penchant -- for getting into trouble. And in 2000, the publication of Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," raised accusations of plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied. An 11-page introduction grew out of several months of conversations with Ms. Delano. In Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. If that essay has today lost its capacity to shock, it is a reflection of how thoroughly Ms. Sontag did her job, serving as a guide to an underground aesthetic that was not then widely known. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work. After further study at Oxford and in Paris, Ms. Sontag was divorced from Dr. Rieff in 1958. The introduction is a gem of lucidity and understatement. “Susan really fought for her life,” Ms. Leibovitz said. She shot her personal photographs with a 35-millimeter camera, sometimes a Leica, in black and white, with Tri-X film, the way she started at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960’s. In 1992, weary of essays, Ms. Sontag published "The Volcano Lover," her first novel in 25 years. “With my parents it was the relationship of a lifetime. Correction: December 31, 2004, Friday A photograph of the critic and novelist Susan Sontag on Wednesday with the continuation of her obituary carried an incomplete credit. On view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art until 4 September 2006, the exhibit links two of Sontag's published volumes - On Photography (1979) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2004) - with approximately 40 photographs from the museum's collection, including two portraits of Sontag, one by Peter Hujar from 1975 and one in Petra, Jordan, by Annie Leibovitz from 1994. Oct. 6, 2006 IN the days after the death of Susan Sontag in December 2004, Annie Leibovitz began searching for photographs for a small book to be given out at … "All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain," she said. She found the form an agony: a long essay took from nine months to a year to complete, often requiring 20 or more drafts. It was by Annie Leibovitz/Contact Press Images. She worked as an editor at Commentary and juggled teaching jobs at City College, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. Little seems to have been held back. You don’t really know quite what you’re doing. “It’s almost like a protection of some kind. In the essay "On Style," published in the same volume, Ms. Sontag offended many readers by upholding the films of Leni Riefenstahl as masterworks of aesthetic form, with little regard for their content. Moving with her husband to Boston, Ms. Sontag earned her master's degrees from Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the second in philosophy the next year. All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up.". I knew she was probably dying.” Ms. Leibovitz had Ms. Sontag flown by air ambulance from Seattle back to New York. ", Others were less enthralled. Some regarded her tendency to revisit her earlier, often controversial positions as ambivalent. She celebrated the communist societies of Cuba and North Vietnam; just as provocatively, she later denounced communism as a form of fascism. It’s just like a clearinghouse for myself.”, But who gets to explain themselves just once these days? Leibovitz has three daughters. Here I am talking about it.”. Her son David Reiff, labeled the photograph as “carnival images of celebrity death”. “I returned to the Montparnasse cemetery today, to visit the polished black-granite sepulcher of Susan Sontag, who died, in 2004, at the age of seventy-two, from a rare blood malignancy. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term. The crush of photographs, Ms. Sontag argued, has shaped our perceptions of the world, numbing us to depictions of suffering. A year earlier, when Ms. Sontag became ill for the final time, Ms. Leibovitz stopped shooting. Twin girls Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother in May 2005. “They’re all totally out of focus and terrible,” she laughed. You go back into yourself. It is drawn from her book “A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005.”, “Susan and Sarah, Harbor Island, Bahamas, December 2002.”. Near the end of the book there are photographs of grandchildren shoveling dirt onto Mr. Leibovitz’s’s grave and of the birth of Ms. Leibovitz’s twins, Susan and Samuelle, by a surrogate mother. Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, 1970 - 1990. Except for a brief preface expressing a general debt to "books and articles by and on Modjeska," Ms. Sontag did not specifically acknowledge her sources. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's". Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences -- … "She found in camp an aesthetic that was very different from what the straight world had acknowledged up to that point, and she managed to make camp 'straight' in a way," Arthur C. 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