photo essays

This book deserves more than five stars. I think it would make a wonderful gift for any young woman starting to decide what it means for her to be a woman.

As Susan Sontag tells us in the essay, "Each of these pictures must stand on its own. But the ensemble says, So this is what women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this."

This exciting book will challenge everyone's concept of what women are and can be in their roles. Many viewers will be uncomfortable with those poerful challenges, while others will find the images to be mentally liberating. "Ambition is what women have been schooled to stifle in themselves, and what is celebrated in a book of photographs that emphasizes the variety of women's lives today," according to Susan Sontag.

Underneath this conceptual work comes a theme built around a striking new sense of what beauty means in a woman, and it has nothing to do with youth and physical perfection. Ms. Leibovitz wonderfully captures what I think of as "soulful" beauty in this remarkable collection of new photographs done for this book. Interestingly, her most beautiful "soul pictures" come of people who are the oldest and have the most lined faces -- like her mother and sculptress Louise Bourgeois. I fell in love with all women, more than ever before, from being with these images. They reminded me of the beauty in the fundamental connection we all have to women, and women have to the fundamentals of life.

As Susan Sontag points out, "Such a book . . . is also about women's attractiveness." "Forever young, forever good-looking, forever sexy -- beauty is still a construction, a transformation, a masquerade." Only occasionally will you see an image of traditional concepts of beauty. The rest as avatars of what beauty may well come to mean for our children.

As you can tell from the quotes I have used, Susan Sontag's essay is a wonderful conversation with the images that helps the reader appreciate their potential. "It is for us to decide what to make of these pictures. After all, a photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?" Clearly, Ms. Leibovitz is expressing opinions with these photographs, but the viewer may often perceive them like a Rorschach test, with the response reflecting more about the viewer than about the image.

One of the most interesting sequences involves three so-called "show-girls" who perform in Nevada casinos. You see them first as ordinary women with tiredness and care lines. Next, they are revealed in their painted, plumed performing personas. You have to look twice, and then a third time, to realize that these are the same women. How more eloquently can you say that conventional concepts of beauty are only skin deep? Or in this case, appearance is only as deep as the cosmetics and costumes used.

Other photographs are revealing in other ways, some almost like a peep show. These are designed to show the reality behind the image, just as the Nevada women's pictures do. For example, you'll see famous ex-models and actresses in very unglamorous, but important women's roles, such as Jeri Hall nursing her baby.

But above all, these women are vibrantly alive. One of my favorites is an underground shot of women in a coal mine with other miners. The women's faces positively glow with energy. You can see the intelligence, the commitment, and the courage they each have. In this sense, the book is about all humanity, not only women.

After you have finished with viewing the photographs and considering the essay, I suggest that you think about your own life, whether you are a woman or a man. What is intelligent, committed, and courageous about what you are or do? How could you be even more so? How could you transfer that vision to another person? How would photographs or an essay help?

Take a look, and see what you think!

er from Amazon and Now His Name is Stuck on My Account

So much for a title.

Annie Leibovitz's book requires no words. Sorry, Susan, I didn't read your text. The best way to enjoy Annie's photos is to set aside your search for a defining message about women. There isn't one. Women are varied creatures just like the rest of humanity and nature.

Don't you just love looking at them? Don't wish you could get a closer look? Don't you wish the interesting one's would stand in just the right light so you could get a better look? Didn't you always think Hillary C. was beautiful, but you didn't know why?

Thank you Annie Leibovitz for taking the interesting women and standing them in a beautiful light and binding them in a huge book so we can stand and stare as long as we want.

Enough said.

Fiction is my preference when writing book reviews, because I love the complexity of words, stories, and the vagaries of human nature with its endless permutations. But when I received Leibovitz's astonishing compilation of photographs as a gift, I thought I might attempt an impression of page after page of females, as seen through the professional eye of one of the most important photographers of our generation.

Who has not gazed in awe at Leibovitz's unusual perspective, the beautiful made even more so? But I want real women with wrinkles and dirt under their fingernails, the kind of women overlooked in the rush to worship human perfection. I want to see if there is a balance, not just the too thin, too gorgeous, too self-indulgent. In that regard, I believe Women contains a preponderance of well-groomed elegance, albeit impressive, for instance a breathtaking portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow and her mother, Blythe Danner. This particular image contrasts a young woman in the blush of her feminine power with the graceful progression of years that adds to a woman's complex attraction. To be sure, there are folios of celebrities, socialites, all those who live in the rarified strata of entitlement.

While not as numerous, the presentation of real women like me, those who inhabit my world, are so powerful as to diminish the bland compositions of society's darlings. The studies of abused women jump off the pages, eyes glazed, the immediacy of domestic violence tattooing their faces, staring into a future devoid of hope; a remarkably insightful photograph of Ellen DeGeneris, virtually unrecognizable under a layer of cracked white greasepaint; two pre-adolescent girls in the back of a pickup truck, displaying a row of leggy blonde Barbie's, with Ken in a faux high school letter jacket, his plastic Prom Queen sporting a crown atop hair that cascades down the length of her body; three young Latino women glare accusingly at the lens, displaying gang colors with pride, ambiguously dangerous; the lines of age score lived-in faces, eyes shadowed by years of struggle, etched finally by the exhaustion of daily survival. For me, these pictures contain the essence of womanhood, untainted by ubiquitous vanities.

In all, Leibovitz "sees" these women, their strengths, frailties and vulnerabilities. This series of images is a walk through the multi-hued, textured world of women, esoteric, generous, often brutally honest and unflinching. Luan Gaines/2004.