Published by Random House in 1999, Women brings together photographs made by Annie Leibovitz specifically for this book, accompanied by an essay by Susan Sontag. Conceived at the end of the twentieth century, the project asks how women might be represented collectively without reducing them to a single social type or ideal. Its answer is cumulative: portrait follows portrait, and difference becomes the organizing principle.
Leibovitz’s subjects range across public office, entertainment, labor, sport, art, education, activism, and domestic service. Supreme Court justices and national political figures appear within the same expansive field as farmers, miners, teachers, athletes, performers, writers, sex workers, and businesswomen. The breadth matters because the book does not treat occupation, fame, or status as a sufficient definition of its subjects. Each image retains the specificity of an encounter, while the sequence places sharply different forms of work, authority, visibility, and self-presentation in conversation.
Sontag’s accompanying text provides an intellectual counterpoint to the photographs. Rather than proposing a definitive image of womanhood, the collaboration emphasizes plurality and the tension between an individual portrait and the larger social meaning created when portraits are assembled. Read from the perspective of 1999, the book also records which roles, institutions, and cultural categories were used to describe women at that historical moment.
For a photobook collection, this first-edition hardcover is significant as the original Random House presentation of a project conceived expressly in book form. Across 248 pages, its meaning depends not only on notable sitters but on accumulation, juxtaposition, and the exchange between Leibovitz’s photographs and Sontag’s essay. It deserves close attention as a sustained editorial construction: an ambitious attempt to picture women through irreducible differences rather than a representative type.
