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Leibovitz's A Photographer's Life, both the 2006 book and the traveling exhibition housed from October 2008 to February 2009 at the National Portrait Gallery in London and more recently shown in Berlin, Madrid, and Vienna, consists of large, airbrushed, highly stylized, lushly colored photos of celebrities that have earned her the designation \"American master\" and a series of mostly small, informal black and white photos of her parents, children, siblings, friends, and lover.7 Of the 341 images contained in the book, which Leibovitz calls \"a memoir in photographs,\" more than two-thirds are personal, and approximately a hundred of these depict Sontag.8 In many photos she appears as a traveler reflecting upon an exotic landscape, an artist at work either writing or directing theatre, a woman engaged in conversation with friends or gazing at her lover's newborn child, or a domestic partner relaxing in a shared and sometimes eroticized space, most often bath or bed.

This paper joins a discussion about the representational dissonance and commemorative ethics of two self-referential works that engage with Susan Sontag’s 2004 death from Myelodysplastic Syndrome: Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life1990–2005 (2006) and David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008). Instead of approaching these two texts as testimonial accounts measured by standards of reliability and grace, this paper considers how the temporal dissonance produced by an incurable cancer diagnosis thwarts questions of personhood and ethical intention in Leibovitz’s photography and Rieff ’s prose. By contextualizing these works as the caregivers’ experience of Sontag’s illness, this paper reads them as attempts at gauging two distinct temporal perspectives that confound identification—those of living through and of remembering terminal time.

Hunger is probably the most salient consequence of poverty. This salience has some rationale: Hunger makes food a priority, and poor people spend about half of their income on it. But hunger is, nevertheless, a symptom of poverty, not a problem to be tackled in isolation -- the solution to hunger may not have much to do with the supply of food. In this rambling book, David Rieff never quite recognizes this fundamental point. Positing that the 2008 spike in global food prices marked the start of structurally higher prices, his discussion revolves around whether we should look for the solution of extra food production in technocratic philanthropy, global agribusiness or revolutionary politics. Arriving at an answer that none look promising, he asks, \"Where does this leave us?\" If there is a \"dim candle,\" he finds it \"in the strengthening of the state and in the promise and the burden of democratic politics.\" He cites the success of Brazil's Zero Hunger program, which reduced malnutrition by framing the issue not as a technical one but as a political one, as \"a matter of social justice and a state's obligations to its citizens.\" Barring this, he foresees mass hunger in many parts of the world.

Rieff believes that she'd gladly have accepted \"an immortality that consisted of nothing but consciousness,\" the \"science-fiction immortality of the disembodied head.\" Because [Susan Sontag], Rieff writes, \"lived her life as if stocking a library\" -- she \"wanted to absorb,\" not \"be absorbed.\" She constantly read (she didn't own a TV), made \"lists of restaurants and books, quotations and facts, writing projects and travel schedules,\" and took in any information available. That bent, Rieff says, explains how she confronted her three cancers. In her '70s battle against breast cancer, she became the \"straight-A student.\" She opted for a radical \"Halstead\" mastectomy - - a brutal operation that removes \"most of the muscle of the chest wall and lymph nodes in the armpits\" -- because she insisted it would improve her \"slim\" chances. In her final illness, she submitted to the bone marrow transplant for the same reason. Rieff's memoir offers more feelings about his mother's death than facts about their relationship, but some of the latter inevitably appear, helping one understand his continuing regrets. He explains that \"neither of us had ever been physically demonstrative with the other,\" a habit that didn't change in the early part of her illness, when he sometimes felt \"unable to say anything that mattered, let alone touch her.\" To Rieff's credit, he knows that \"the guilt comes no matter what you have or haven't done.\"

[David Rieff] speculates that it's sometimes better to do nothing than to act. Many Ethiopians alive today who owe their survival to the emergency help given by western taxpayers and charitably funded NGOs may be forgiven for taking a different view. Rieff's endorsement of De Waal's astonishing assertion that \"the relief effort . . . may have contributed to as many deaths\" as the number of lives it saved deserves to be treated with incredulous contempt.

Journalist [David Rieff], who has reported on many humanitarian crises, set out to assess the effectiveness of relief efforts in the face of genocidal atrocities in the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere. Rieff says humanitarian groups have moved from simple relief efforts to a policy of active support of intervention to stop the worst human-rights abuses, a movement he both praises and criticizes. One problem is that Rieff seems not to have thought through what he really believes. His dense writing relies on long-winded sentences, copious quotes from minor figures, much repetition and frequent use of acronyms such as ICRC, MSF and NGO.

I thought of this tale of irony while reading [David Rieff]'s book of despair, \"A Bed for the Night.\" Rieff, who spent 10 years on the most gory and disturbing front lines of 1990s global turmoil, would undoubtedly argue that my little Jordanian \"refugee\" story demonstrated the failures and foibles of humanitarian groups operating in the last days of innocence before the gates of hell opened on Earth, giving us Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, the Taliban's Afghanistan and, now emerging for our disquieting observation, Robert Mugabe's starving Zimbabwe. Rieff's issue is one you have no doubt pondered when poised over your checkbook, about to dash off another donation to your church's overseas agency, the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders) or UNICEF. He asks what good is done with that money and what purpose, ultimately, humanitarianism serves. He gives you little solace from lingering suspicions that all is not well on the crisis-relief front. After Somalia, Rieff says, a gun-shy West turned to the United Nations and humanitarian organizations, supporting their activities in lieu of taking military action, which might have stopped Serbs from slaughtering Bosnians at Srebrenica or Hutus from massacring Tutsis in Kigali. Rieff disdains this role for humanitarian groups, labeling it \"putting Band-Aids on malignant tumors\" and \"containment through charity.\" He argues that well-meaning people are making matters far worse by offering a sort of mass-scale guilt relief for the wealthy world while allowing large-scale \"humane\" dislocation of populations fleeing cruel military or marauding forces - none of which is challenged by Western military might.

Particularly thought-provoking is [David Rieff]'s depiction of the moral quagmire aid workers faced during the genocide in Rwanda, in which victims and murderers, both groups too numerous to count, switched places midstream. His chronicling of the irony of the U.S.- sponsored food drops in Afghanistan -- in yellow packages the same color as the bombs being dropped -- shows plainly how a humanitarian project can lose credibility when it provides sheep's clothing for a military operation. While A Bed for the Night deserves a wider audience, it's likely to put off readers who aren't intensely interested policy-makers, aid workers or academics. Exhaustive reporting, while lending authority to Rieff's thesis, bogs down the text with too many characters, attributions and acronyms. Rieff spends too much time exploring the inconsistencies of the \"language\" of humanitarians who have branched into advocacy to improve the world, and not nearly enough on exactly how relief organizations should go about their work independently in an age of extremely conflicted loyalties.