Cancer Narratives and an Ethics of Commemoration: Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz, and David Rieff

This essay considers how photographic and biographical forms of memorialization can pay ethical tribute to women who die of cancer, thereby inviting readers and viewers to respond as witnesses rather than as voyeurs. Its focal subjects are controversial photographs by Annie Leibovitz in A Photographer's Life (2006) of Susan Sontag during her struggles with three different cancers—from mastectomy to chemotherapy to bone marrow transplant to decline and death—and an acclaimed memoir of his mother's final year, Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008) by Sontag's son, David Rieff. The author of this essay argues that both Leibovitz's visual narrative and Rieff's written account offer grim, unsettling, yet eloquent and just commemoration of Sontag's life and death—commemoration that provides reader-viewers with elegiac spaces of intersubjective connectivity. Sontag's theories of illness and photography and feminist critical perspectives on art, trauma, witness, and embodiment provide scholarly support for this argument.