{"id":250739,"date":"2025-10-30T19:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T19:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/250739\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T19:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T19:41:07","slug":"25-years-later-annie-leibovitz-raises-the-question-of-women-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/250739\/","title":{"rendered":"25 Years Later, Annie Leibovitz Raises the \u2018Question of Women\u2019 Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1988, Annie Leibovitz<\/a> met Susan Sontag during a shoot to support Sontag\u2019s upcoming work of critical theory, AIDS and Its Metaphors.\u00a0A dinner<\/a> followed, for which the photographer anxiously prepared, reading Sontag\u2019s writing, taking notes. It would be the start of a relationship that lasted 15 years, with Sontag catalyzing Leibovitz\u2019s momentous volume of portraits Women (first published in 1999). \u201cA book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women,\u201d Sontag wrote in the introduction. \u201cThere is no equivalent \u2018question of men.\u2019 Men, unlike women, are not a work in progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question of women\u2014it\u2019s a ridiculously large query. But Sontag\u2019s argument was for capaciousness: \u201cThe point is that all the images are valid,\u201d she asserted. \u201cA woman may be a cop or a beauty queen or an architect or a housewife or a physicist.\u201d Twenty-five years later, the litany seems almost quaint\u2014a Richard Scarry\u2013esque array of occupations, any of them open to a young girl!\u2014and yet still a relevant gesture toward the careers where women remain underrepresented. (Only about a quarter of physicists<\/a> and licensed architects<\/a> in the United States are female.)<\/p>\n

This fall, the tackling of this thorny matter continues with a new edition of Women<\/a> (Phaidon), which pairs the 1999 collection with more recent photographs, taken between 1993 and today, alongside new essays by Gloria Steinem and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie<\/a>. (Its publication coincides with an exhibition of Leibovitz\u2019s work<\/a>, titled \u201cWonderland,\u201d at the Marta Ortega P\u00e9rez Foundation in A Coru\u00f1a, Spain.) As Leibovitz writes in her introduction, the new work is an evolution: \u201cFor this volume, I thought about issues that are important today.\u201d So there are photos of poet Amanda Gorman and Toni Morrison; of Shonda Rhimes on set and Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, DC; of Katie Ledecky in a Maryland pool and Sarah Zorn at The Citadel military college, where she was the first female regimental commander in the school\u2019s history. \u201cThat women have made economic and political strides is not in dispute,\u201d writes Adichie<\/a>, \u201cbut we are still very far away from the ultimate goal of feminism, which is to make itself redundant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1988, Annie Leibovitz met Susan Sontag during a shoot to support Sontag\u2019s upcoming work of critical theory,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2428,76,354,355,353,49,48,356,75,117168,19835,14424,1778,343],"class_list":{"0":"post-250739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-_sensitivecontent","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-design","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-midcontents-disabled","18":"tag-onecolumn","19":"tag-storytypenews-trending","20":"tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","21":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}