A few weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus's obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She's wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back - arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There's a slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing which I like: very true to life. Every few hours now she floats up onscreen in this digitised format, supine, sleek and flat-chested.

LRB 17 March 2005 | PDF Download