The Tempest

Issue date: 11/8/06 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Dawn Bonner Up close and personal with Annie Leibovitz in Berkeley.

Media Credit: Dawn Bonner Annie Leibovitz signs her book for a fan.

"A picture paints a thousand words." Add poignant to this expression and you begin to have the essence of Annie Leibovitz's new book, "Annie Leibovitz A Photographer's Life 1990-2005." This blue linen, eight pound, 472 page book is a beautiful auto-biography that keeps the reader eagerly anticipating what is next.

Leibovitz's honesty, vulnerability and purity catch one off guard. Possibly the best known and most successful photographer of our time, a celebrity in her own right, she has photographed the movers and shakers of the last four decades. It has become a status symbol to have an image captured by this unpretentious, gentle woman.

It would be easy to have an ego the size of New York City with her resume. Yet, upon turning the pages of her latest creation, those thoughts slip away and new thoughts form.

Great admiration of her work and the ability to feel like you know her better than your best friend, are among those new thoughts. A sense of pride regarding her many accomplishments, are laced with empathy, and sadness for her losses.

Leibovitz holds nothing back in this manuscript. She takes us on a journey-her journey of life, love, grief, loss, joys, and work. We experience the death of her long time lover, Susan Sontag, the birth of one of her precious daughters, and even her naked and pregnant body.

Leibovitz's first words in her book are, "I don't have two lives. This is one life and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it."

And her statement rings true all the way to the end of the book.

Gorgeously refined photos of Scarlett Johannson, Nicole Kidman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Pacino, to name but a few, are peppered amongst photos of her siblings, nieces and nephews.

Pictures of her parents frolicking at their beach house, followed by photos of her first passion, landscape photography, make for an interesting and diverse essay that is never boring.

Looking at the pages in "A Photographer's Life…" is like mulling fine wine in your mouth. The photographs are so rich, that you want to absorb each one by lingering over every frame.

Moving from color to black and white flawlessly, from celebrity to travels across the continent, you have no idea what is next. It is joyously unpredictable.

This book needs to be experienced first hand. It is as worthy of your time as John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, or William Faulkner classics. You won't be the same when you are finished with the must have book. "A Photographer's Life" touches the heart unlike any other book I have been with in a very long time.

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