In 1988, Annie Leibovitz met Susan Sontag during a shoot to support Sontag’s upcoming work of critical theory, AIDS and Its Metaphors. A dinner followed, for which the photographer anxiously prepared, reading Sontag’s writing, taking notes. It would be the start of a relationship that lasted 15 years, with Sontag catalyzing Leibovitz’s momentous volume of portraits Women (first published in 1999). “A book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women,” Sontag wrote in the introduction. “There is no equivalent ‘question of men.’ Men, unlike women, are not a work in progress.”
The question of women—it’s a ridiculously large query. But Sontag’s argument was for capaciousness: “The point is that all the images are valid,” she asserted. “A woman may be a cop or a beauty queen or an architect or a housewife or a physicist.” Twenty-five years later, the litany seems almost quaint—a Richard Scarry–esque array of occupations, any of them open to a young girl!—and yet still a relevant gesture toward the careers where women remain underrepresented. (Only about a quarter of physicists and licensed architects in the United States are female.)
This fall, the tackling of this thorny matter continues with a new edition of Women (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. (Its publication coincides with an exhibition of Leibovitz’s work, titled “Wonderland,” at the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.) As Leibovitz writes in her introduction, the new work is an evolution: “For this volume, I thought about issues that are important today.” 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’s history. “That women have made economic and political strides is not in dispute,” writes Adichie, “but we are still very far away from the ultimate goal of feminism, which is to make itself redundant.”
The new images collected in the two-volume edition, and previewed below, feel less like a statement of possibility than of accomplishment—in many, varied forms. “These images shrug off the cloying and flattening demands of virtue,” writes Adichie, “they are set free, as are our imaginations. We see more clearly the small, exquisite heroism of women.”
They are also a documentation of both progress and struggle—a dynamic that has always been inherent in Leibovitz’s work. In her essay, Steinem describes how a hunt for female photographers to contribute to Ms. magazine in the 1970s led her to Leibovitz—the rare portrait photographer who was a woman. “We soon discovered that women could be reportage photographers recording street scenes, but not frequently portrait photographers, who required lights and a studio, necessities that were beyond their earning power,” Steinem writes. Leibovitz turned her lens to a different kind of subject than many of the male portrait photographers working at the time. “Annie’s attention legitimized them,” writes Steinem.
Below, a selection of images from the new collection.
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