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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblad and we are continuing with women, writing, and the imagination, our special

series of nine conversations with prominent women in the arts at the beginning of the 21st

century.

And today I'm very proud to have as my guest, Annie Leibovitz.

She has put together a collection of photographs of women.

It is including this album, an essay by Susan Sontag on the photographs.

It is published by Random House.

It is one of the first in our series on Bookworm about women. And I'm very delighted. As I began to look at the book, I found that I had to, in a way, make friends with the people in the pictures before I looked at the pictures.

I looked at them two or three times before seeing them themselves as compositions.

And I wondered, to what extent do the presence of such famous women on the one hand and very striking images on the other put your role as a

photographer in the background? I think the book had many agendas and it was the challenge of putting it together, which was, of course, ultimately what the edit was going to say.

And there were many times that you're absolutely right, the photography was playing second fiddle, had to sit back and, you know, that there were women that I thought were

important that should be part of this collection, that it wasn't necessarily a great photograph.

I'm thinking of Maya Lynn. You know, it's a very, very simple portrait. On the other hand, I sort of thought it worked because the simpler I could be

with the approach and trying to like not to interfere as much as I often do in taking a picture.

That style of, you know, conveyed a kind of honesty, you know.

...