Like it or not, Annie Leibovitz, is the best-known photographer of her time. She earned that status largely because she has photographed the best-known people of her time for publications that delivered those pictures to a mass audience. And that audience always seems to want more.

Her photographs on assignment over the last two decades can be viewed as our era’s official portraits. They are posed pictures, almost always with the full cooperation of those depicted, among them the Reagans, Eudora Welty. Merce Cunningham, William S. Burroughs, Sylvester Stallone (from the neck down), Keith Haring, Nicole Kidman, Michael Moore, George W. Bush and his inner circle.

The exhibition (and accompanying book) A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005, Leibovitz has taken her pictures beyond the celebrity zeitgeist’s timeline. She has gone into her family life, with images of her parents, siblings and the extended Leibovitz clan. She has taken us into her love life with the writer Susan Sontag (the author of On Photography), and recorded moments of Sontag’s losing battle with cancer, which ended with her death in 2004. Leibovitz has even included a post mortem shot of Sontag, in a coffin, garbed in what is said to have been a favourite dress.

True to form for Leibovitz, it seems intended to be a jarringly unfamiliar view of a familiar and famous person. Let’s assume that, since Leibovitz composed it and she composed her professional work with draconian precision it was what Sontag would have wanted.

Leibovitz, in the introduction to the volume, the only introduction that she has ever written, calls the collection a work of archaeology, which involved sifting through 15 years of pictures. You could also view her 200 pictures as a set of parallel lines that charts her assignments, her personal life and an unexpected sampling of landscapes. Occasionally we see those lines converge, as in a picture of a passageway in the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. Sontag is tiny standing next to the huge rocks, which allow only a sliver of light.
The pictures were shot after Leibovitz herself had become a celebrity, with 10 years at Vanity Fair already under her belt, and 10 years before that at Rolling Stone.