In recent years Leibovitz has undertaken several projects of photographing people who are not famous. She has done a series of portraits of people with AIDS, and she went to the Balkans to take pictures of the victims of the war in Bosnia.

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In 1992 Leibovitz told an interviewer that "the biological clock is definitely ticking" and that for several years she had been considering having children. However, it was not until 2001, at the age of 52, that she gave birth to a daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, whom she named after Julia Margaret Cameron, a Victorian Englishwoman who was among the first female professional photographers. Leibovitz has not identified the father of her child, who was conceived through artificial insemination.

For over a decade Leibovitz was the close companion of writer Susan Sontag (1933-2004), who was present at the birth of the former's baby, but the two did not publicly discuss the nature of their relationship.

This reticence brought them criticism from some lesbians and gay men. Outspoken lesbian critic Camille Paglia has remarked that "One of my primary gripes about Sontag from the start was her cowardice about her sex life." When Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon suggested that she had lesbian relationships, Sontag's lawyers threatened possible lawsuits; and Norton, the publisher of the book, decided not to issue it in Britain for fear of an action for libel.

Leibovitz is as private as Sontag was, noting in a 1999 interview in the Washington Post that she and Sontag had separate apartments--although in the same complex--and designating friend the appropriate term for their relationship. "You'd be wrong to say anything else," she insisted.

Although Leibovitz and Sontag were largely silent on the subject of their relationship, they appeared in public together for years. Leibovitz was photographed by Sontag's side at the latter's readings and lectures. Sontag accompanied Leibovitz to Mexico and Warsaw for exhibitions of her photographs. The two also traveled to Bosnia together during the war there.

Leibovitz and Sontag collaborated professionally on Women (1999), a lavish book of Leibovitz's photographs with an essay by Sontag. The first photograph in the book is of Leibovitz's mother, and the last is of Sontag. Over one hundred women are pictured in the book, and there are thumbnail biographies of all the principal subjects except Sontag and one woman identified only as "Victim of Domestic Violence."

There is some debate as to the value of Leibovitz's photographs as art. Some critics dismiss her work because of its focus on celebrities and its commercialism. Others, however, point to her imagination and creativity in posing her subjects and stress the importance of her photographs as documents of popular culture.

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The frequently outrageous cultural commentary and caustic criticism of Camille Paglia have made her both famous and controversial.

Although she treated her own lesbianism as a strictly private matter, Susan Sontag wrote perceptively on gay male figures and issues.