Charmed Circle, The photographs of Annie Leibovitz

The October 25 issue of the leading Hungarian daily Népszabadság features an extensive profile of American photojournalist Annie Leibovitz on the occasion of her recently opened retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and the concurrent publication of her lavish pictorial autobiography, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 (New York: Random House). The 472-page album contains many hitherto unpublished intimate images of Susan Sontag, with whom Leibovitz shared her life for several years. Sontag is well known to Hungarian readers not only for championing Hungarian writers such as Péter Nádas, but through her own oeuvre as well, much of which has been translated and published in Hungary.

A volume of essays selected from Sontag’s collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will was published in Hungary as far back as 1972, under the title A pusztulás képei (Budapest: Európa). It adds a curiously pleasant note to Susan Sontag’s reception history in Hungary that one of the translators of this volume was Árpád Göncz – a silenced dissident at the time – who in 1990 would become the first democratically elected president of the country. When during a state visit to the U.S. Göncz was invited to the White House, he requested that Sontag be placed on his guest list.

André Balog