Annie Leibovitz: Women: 2025 Edition

Somewhere in the essay Susan Sontag wrote for the first version of this project, the floor drops away. A book of women, she argues, can never be the neutral thing a book of men could pretend to be, because a woman is still read first as an appearance and only afterward as a person. It is a hard sentence to shake once it is in your head. Annie Leibovitz has spent the quarter century since photographing against it, and this 2025 edition is where the accumulated answer finally sits together in one volume.

What does a photographer do with a mandate that enormous? She refuses to narrow it. The subjects run from a coal miner black to the elbows to Las Vegas showgirls in full plumage, from soldiers and farmworkers to Supreme Court justices, from new mothers still stunned in their hospital beds to women in their nineties who have outlived every label once pinned to them. There is no ladder of access here. The famous and the unknown get the same seriousness, the same patient attention, the same refusal to condescend to anyone in the frame.

The first Women appeared in 1999, a collaboration in the fullest sense: Leibovitz supplying the photographs, Sontag supplying the argument that framed them. Sontag has been gone two decades now, and the pictures have kept accumulating without her, which lends this edition the strange weight of a conversation continued with an absent partner. The essay still sets the terms. The photographs keep testing them.

The technical range is itself part of the argument. Leibovitz moves from the controlled theater of a studio strobe to hard midday light on a factory floor without letting the method upstage the person standing in it. A chief executive photographed with the gloss of a magazine cover shares a spread with a survivor shot plainly and close, and the pictures insist on holding both registers without ranking them. She has always been a builder of images, an arranger of light and setting, and the discipline of this project is how often she sets all of that aside when the face in front of her asks her to.

Sequencing is where the argument gets made or lost, and here it is made. A rancher gives way to a ballerina, a senator to a stripper, a child to a woman near the end of a long life, and the cuts are never played for easy contrast. The order asks you to hold these people in a single gaze without sorting them, and the longer the pages run the harder it becomes to remember which of them you were meant to find important.

The new edition matters more than a reprint usually would. It extends the roster into a generation that rose after the original closed, women who became consequential in years the first book could not have known about, so the sequence reads less as a finished monument and more as a record still gathering names. The project ages the way its subjects do, in stages, without pretending the story has a final page.

Return to Sontag's claim and the pictures begin to argue with it productively. A portrait of a four-star officer in dress uniform carries her authority plainly, a portrait of a woman photographed after an assault carries a different order of fact, and the book flatly declines to rank one truth above the other. That refusal is the political act the essay called for, made quietly, one exposure at a time. Appearance is never only appearance here; it is evidence, and the camera treats it that way.

A skeptic has the objection ready. A catalog this determined to include everyone risks turning individuals into representatives, one of each kind, a census in couture. And Leibovitz, whose day job made celebrity gleam for decades, could be accused of aestheticizing every subject she touches into the same expensive finish. The worry is fair enough to say out loud.

The pictures dissolve it anyway. She photographs the specific person in front of the lens, not the demographic that person stands in for, and the specificity is what survives the turn of the page. The showgirl holds her own beside the justice. The miner is not a symbol of labor; she is one particular woman at the end of one particular shift, and the frame knows the difference and keeps it.

Category is only the pretext. The face is the payload.

Held together, the collection proves the thing Sontag could only assert on the page. Woman is not a single subject, and the only honest portrait of the category is a plurality this wide, this stubborn, this unwilling to resolve into a type. The breadth is not a curatorial flourish laid over the work; it is the entire thesis, argued in faces instead of paragraphs. Plenty of photographers could not carry a project this large without it slumping into worthiness or spectacle. This one carries it, image after image, for hundreds of pages.

Picture a young photographer opening the book cold, landing on a spread where a decorated general faces a teenage girl across the gutter, and finding she genuinely cannot say which of the two commands the page. The general has the medals; the girl has the whole of a life she has not yet spent. She flips back a moment later to check who the famous one was supposed to be. By then the point has already landed, and she has quietly stopped keeping score.