What's in a word? Annie Leibovitz has a new book and a new exhibit of photography chronicling the intimate moments of her life, including a 15-year relationship with her "friend" Susan Sontag.

"I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it," Annie Leibovitz writes in the introduction to A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005. This new work is "the closest thing to who I am that I've ever done," she concludes.

Certainly this is the famous photographer's most important work of self-revelation. Not only does she include intimate family photographs and her celebrated personality portraits of public figures ranging from Colin Powell to Demi Moore, she also, for the first time, publishes endearing and disquieting photographs of her "friend," Susan Sontag. These shots show, for example, the writer lounging on a paper-strewn bed with a typewriter on a table nearby; the writer in a hospital bed, enduring the agony of chemotherapy; and, finally, the writer lying dead, bruised and bloated after her last bout with cancer.

This is not a book I ever expected Leibovitz to produce. While working on Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, which I cowrote with my wife, Lisa Paddock, countless interviewees told us the Sontag-Leibovitz relationship was so taboo they expected us to be sued for mentioning it. And we did receive threatening letters and calls from attorneys acting on Sontag's behalf--although, in the end, no legal proceedings ensued. In fact, when the biography became a news item in The New York Observer, The New York Times, and other publications, Sontag began to recount for interviewers her sexual affairs--with women and men, although she did not name names.

Even more reticent than Sontag, Leibovitz has been downright hostile when questioned about her sexuality and her relationship with Sontag. Yet the November issue of Vanity Fair includes Sontag's photo of a nude, pregnant Leibovitz and a brief commentary mentioning that Leibovitz and Sontag became "partners" in the late '80s. "Partners" is, believe it or not, a step forward for Leibovitz--and nothing about Leibovitz appears in Vanity Fair without her say-so. I know, because she killed an article the magazine was planning to do on our book. A letter from a Vanity Fair editor also stated that without Sontag's cooperation such an article could not be published.

That scare quotes still need to be wrapped around "friend" to refer to the Sontag-Leibovitz liaison exposes the inadequacy of Leibovitz's latest book. If life and work are one, what are connections between family, work, and friendship--not to mention the role love plays in Leibovitz's biography and photography?

Both Leibovitz's text and her photographs compartmentalize. If Sontag ever met Leibovitz's family, the photographs do not show it, and Leibovitz's words do not acknowledge any such encounters. If Sontag, a celebrity herself, had any dealings with Leibovitz's assigned subjects (Sontag certainly knew some of them), again, the photographs and text do not say. As seemingly candid as this book is, the Sontag of On Photography would have cast a skeptical eye on it, noting that photographs conceal as much as they reveal.

Indeed, Leibovitz's introduction and the interviews she has orchestrated to help launch her book are an exercise in closeting. Although Leibovitz and Sontag shared homes together in New York and Paris, traveled the world together, and were an item for 15 years in New York City, the price for access to her presence and her photographs is pussyfooting profiles in Newsweek, The New York Times, and The [London] Guardian. It is all rather Victorian, with Leibovitz huffing to The Guardian: "Words like 'companion' and 'partner' were not in our vocabulary. We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still 'friend.'"

The Sontag seen in Leibovitz's book is an inspiration: Susan the enabler, presented without even the caveat Leibovitz expressed in one publication's puff piece that "Susan was not easy." You can say that again. Sontag was notorious for her withering remarks, dressing down Leibovitz in public, scorning her "friend's" effort to adhere to Sontag's high notions of art. One Leibovitz assistant told me that Leibovitz sometimes sounded like a page out of On Photography's denigration of efforts to capture the world with a camera.

Of course, Sontag had the shiny side Leibovitz documents--the joy of adventure, the desire to open new worlds of perception to her "friend"--but to view the world through a Leibovitz lens is rather like asserting that the moon has no dark side. Leibovitz has been so adamant about covering up her relationship with Sontag that some kind of overcorrection is required to realign the orbit these lesbian partners actually traveled.

Fortunately, we have the testimony of Edward Field, a poet who was there at the creation, so to speak; who watched, from near and far, Sontag's iconic ascent. In The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, Field writes about the "ups and downs" of Sontag's relationship with Leibovitz, and the "split-up after Leibovitz had a baby at the age of fifty--the father of the baby had been undisclosed, but rumor has it that the sperm was donated by Susan's son, journalist David Rieff, which, if true, would make Susan its grandmother! Not a very loving grandmother, it appears, since reportedly she broke up with Leibovitz over her presumed grandchild--Leibovitz gave more attention to the baby than to Susan." Field has been attacked for writing a waspish memoir, but what he is offering is a kind of antidote to decades of closeting Leibovitz and Sontag not only in Vanity Fair and Vogue but also in The New York Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker.

So were Leibovitz and Sontag lovers? Is Leibovitz edging toward outing herself? She never comes close to a frank account of her life with Sontag, and the exhibition "A Photographer's Life," which opened October 20 at the Brooklyn Museum, will not help to answer these questions. Indeed, the museum's publicist, when mentioning the photographs of Sontag, referred to her as Leibovitz's "friend."

As a book, A Photographer's Life does not hang together any more than Leibovitz's account of her own life does. And this is a shame--quite literally a shame. Perhaps Leibovitz, for all her self-congratulatory rhetoric, knows as much. She told The Guardian that if Sontag were standing behind her, "she would be championing this work." How could this be, when Leibovitz also says Sontag would not have wanted the photographs published while she was alive? Caught in contradictions within contradictions, Leibovitz only makes matters worse when she concludes the interview by saying, "Susan always said she felt that art really had to rise above the personal." This assertion is immediately followed by the last words of the article: "Leibovitz disagrees."

Rollyson also writes for The New York Sun.