nobody likes Susan Sontag, great critic of North American society who died in 2004 while contemplating photography ethicsone of his great horses. He did this early in his article ‘On Photography’ and shortly before his death in the foundation.It’s about the pain of others. The writing of that book paralleled the third cancer he had faced and the images of torture circulating at the time in Abu Ghraib that showed Iraqi soldiers enjoying these gruesome missions. It wasn’t the first time the images had attacked the author. As a child, he was faced with a book. Holocaust photos it was for him before and after his formation as humans. The image is never neutral and left it written as such. I’ll call He stated that the camera is a “predator weapon” and its use could turn into “aggression”.
And yet, paradoxically, it was precisely with him that the author’s longest and deepest relationship was. A photographer, Annie Leibovitzalthough they never refer to each other as a ‘couple’ in public. They couldn’t be further away. Leibovitz adored the glamor of the movie stars he captured magnificently on camera, and was known as the last person to shoot a photo shutter in front of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, just hours before Mark David Chapman did so with a real gun in front of the singer. . Sontag was the polar opposite, a serious and deep thinker who was often uncompromising and terrible. They met when Leibovitz was over 39 and Sontag over 55.
Final stage of Sontag’s disease fully documented by his partner’s camera. The author, who never admitted death or even denied the disease, underwent a painful bone marrow transplant and failed. Throughout this process, his friend’s purpose was to document the gruesome struggle with death every day.
sincerity revealed
Two years after his death, Leibovitz was offered a retrospective exhibition of all his work for the National Portrait Gallery in London, and was faced with the dilemma: Should he include the photos he had taken of his companion on his deathbed, or even the more controversial one? did he do it when he was already a corpse? They were part of his life. And he never wanted to reveal his privacy. He consulted with some mutual friends, but did not accept the reluctance of Sontag’s son, David Rieff, whom the photographer reminded that one of the first functions of photography was to depict the dead to preserve their memory. The black and white photograph in question, divided into several overlapping parts joined by adhesive tape in a panoramic format by its author, shows the mortal remains in the coffin.. It was the most disturbing image of the exhibition and has since Rieff and Leibovitz became powerful enemies. His son wrote that there were “carnival images of the death of a celebrity” to support a thought that seemed in line with his mother’s writings. Even if he was the one who allowed his partner to document his recent defeat.