While Susan Sontag lay dying


The unseemliness of Annie Leibovitz, one of the world's best-known photographers, publishing (in the Guardian), intimate portraits of her lover Susan Sontag in the months before she died in December 2004 and then in the immediate aftermath of her death as she was laid out in the mortuary gurney, is perhaps only explicable in terms of her mourning, anger and outrage at being abandoned.

In this respect it outflanks an article by Sontag's son David Rieff published some months earlier. At her bedside, he presented an account of her dying which also might better have remained an important private moment between mother and son. It surely cheapened her stature to describe what seemed to be her sheer disbelief and fury that she too, like everyone else, was having to face extinction. "I'm special", she appeared to be saying, "so special".

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