Your description of her is very penetrating. "Ingenious" as stealth praise, as Trojan horse, as an indictment difficult to refute. If her friend examined illness as metaphor, Liebovitz has made a career of examining--or celebrating--celebrity as illness.

About photographing the dead and dying, whether kin or battlefield casualty, somebody once wrote that the problem is that photography aestheticizes everything (Janet Malcolm? Sontag herself?). Which helps explain the allure and aura of authenticity of the snapshot, the furtive grabshot, the grainy blurry yellowed picture found in a drawer.

It's as if these kind of pictures retain their capacity to shock (or evoke poignance or nostalgia) through a flu shot that inoculates them against the aesthetisizing, distancing virus that "serious" photography spreads.

So naturally some photographers have injected themselves with Kool-Aid quantities of that vaccine and run around pointing pinhole cameras at everything or bought software that duplicates the look of drugstore-developed color negative film.

Your essay also made me think of Joel-Peter Witkin. (Weird work to think of at 10:30 in the morning; kind of like spooning sea urchin and pure grain alcohol over your conflakes.

(Oops, I meant cornflakes, but maybe that's a Freudian slip.)

Anyway, just wondering if Witkin's manipulations of the grotesque manage to dig deeper into our obsessions about death and mutilation without having to "just say no" to the extraordinary aesthetic capacities of the medium.

Or maybe it's just another kind of schtick. But one that's all his own.

[If any of you have nothing better to do, drop by ericlevin.net, which I recently updated with many new photographs]