“This venture was by no means accomplished,” Annie Leibovitz as soon as stated of Ladies, the landmark guide of portraits she created in 1999 together with her late companion, Susan Sontag. Talking to The New York Occasions almost twenty years later, Leibovitz made clear that the venture—then touring the globe as an exhibition—wasn’t meant to be finite. “It’s not a kind of initiatives that may ever have an ending.”
Making good on that idea, this November, 25 years after its unique publication, Ladies is returning in a brand new slipcased version: a two-volume set from Phaidon pairing the unique guide with a wholly new companion quantity of portraits made between 2000 and the current. Collectively, they provide a sweeping meditation on femininity, energy, vulnerability, and the visible vocabulary we use to outline all three.
Susan McNamaraPhotograph: Courtesy of Phaidon © Annie Leibovitz
The unique Ladies was a deeply private endeavor—not solely resulting from Sontag’s involvement (she penned the incisive essay that accompanied the imagery) but in addition due to the reverence with which Leibovitz approached her topics. The portraits of Louise Bourgeois, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Eileen Collins weren’t merely about visibility—they have been about legacy.
Sontag’s textual content, first excerpted in Vogue in 1999, interrogated the very concept of a guide of ladies’s portraits, positing that no such effort for males could be obtained in the identical method. “However then a guide of images of males wouldn’t be undertaken in the identical spirit,” she famous. “Every of those photos should stand by itself. However the ensemble says, So that is what girls at the moment are.”
