ANNIE'S HALL

Spotlight

as much as any of the portraits in Annie Leibovitz's stunning new book, titled simply Women, due out October 26, this one of Jerry Hall suggests the complexity of the photographer's work. The pose is contemporary—the insolent stare as much as the baby at Hall's breast—yet it's framed by a 19th-century formality. A century ago, as Susan Sontag observes in her shrewd introduction, women were photographed solely for their beauty, which they projected as "something enigmatic, dreamy, inaccessible." Now they stare brazenly into the lens as womanhood's new warriors. And yet beauty still rules. "Imagine a book of pictures of women in which none of the women could be identified as beautiful," Sontag muses. "Wouldn't we feel that the photographer had made some kind of mistake?"

Leibovitz, a celebrity portraitist without peer who regularly manages to capture for Vanity Fair the private sides of public figures, is clearly fascinated by this conundrum. She shows us women whose beauty shimmers with power—Hillary Clinton's focused expression while studying a text, the rippled back of Martina Navratilova. Yet here are others whose beauty is still defined by sexual subjugation—a line of Texas cheerleaders stepping so high that their legs block their faces, even as they bare their innermost thighs. And aging, for all, remains an unequal employer. "A man ages into his powers," Sontag says. "A woman ages into being no longer desired."

Leibovitz's portrait of poet and singer Patti Smith offers the best rebuttal in this gallery to such gloom. It is at once an homage to the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whose own portrait of Smith was a defining work in his career) and a picture of a rock star. Leibovitz's greater interest, however, is in what kind of woman Smith is: middle-aged, contemporary, proud, tough, and still— without makeup!—beautiful.

MICHAEL SHNAYERSON