Broken Hallelujah

In her new book, A Photographer's Life, Annie Leibovitz, our most famous photographer, places celebs side by side with surprisingly personal images of love and loss. An exclusive.

Sitting in her Greenwich Village office, wearing jeans and sneakers, Leibovitz explains how Sontag's death in December 2004—followed only weeks later by the death of Leibovitz's father—propelled her to make this book. "It totally came out of a moment," she says. "I had already done some looking at photographs of Susan—that was very hard—for a little memorial book. I had never taken the time to see what I had, really." She would weep and pin the pictures up on the long walls of an old barn at her country place in upstate New York. "And then, I got very excited, trying to look from 1990 to 2005, as if Susan was standing behind me." Leibovitz tears up and reaches for a box of tissues.

Photographer Annie Liebovitz does Newsweek, and shoots her own cover. What may be the most controversial aspect of Leibovitz's book is the intimate pictures from her relationship with Susan Sontag, and particularly the painful images of the writer when she was seriously ill with cancer. Don't miss the photos, especially the one she took the day after Sontag died. Just a very tender and beautiful piece.

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