HER STORIES

Two books by monumental photographers offer a prismatic view of womanhood.

- By Chloe Schama.

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 would last 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 question continues with a new edition of