The day after she was named dean of Stanford's Law School last February, Kathleen Sullivan was sitting in her office when the phone rang. "Hi, I'm Annie Leibovitz," came the voice on the line. "I'm a photographer from New York. I was wondering if I could come shoot you for a book I'm doing on women."
Sullivan said yes "after I picked myself off the floor," she recalls. The next day, the famed photographer arrived on campus to make a portrait of Sullivan, a leading constitutional scholar. The shoot lasted four hours and included an entourage of black-clad assistants, a truckload of lighting equipment and a wind machine. "She was remarkably warm and charming, yet incredibly focused and intense," Sullivan says of Leibovitz. The new dean says she likes the portrait "very much. It is direct and serious and captures the gravity of the job I had just learned I was taking on."
Sullivan isn't the only Stanford face in the photographer's new book, Women (Random House; $75), which was published in November. It includes portraits of drama professor Anna Deavere Smith (in full thespian mode), astronaut Eileen Collins, MS '86 (decked out in a flight suit), Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, '76 (ensconced in the cabin of a corporate jet), and actress Sigourney Weaver, '72 (stretched out in a fishnet catsuit).
