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ANNIE LEIBOVITZ visits San Diego on February 15 for the exhibition opening. We spoke with the busy photographer by phone in a Newark airport, en route to England for a photo shoot with actress Judy Dench.

You photographed Kirsten Dunst in spectacular Marie Antoinette costumes for a Vogue cover. Was that one of your more expensive shoots?
What costs the most is travel——to take a group of people to Paris and put them up in a hotel for five or six days. I did just work on something for the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, and it was like making a small film. What’s great about this point in my life is I have the option of doing what makes the most sense. When you do Vogue and those fashion spreads, you are allowed to go as fast as your imagination takes you. Another complicated shoot was based on The Wizard of Oz. I had [American conceptual artist] Jeff Koons flying in the air. I couldn’t believe he agreed to do it, but I think he enjoyed the part.

It is clear that Susan Sontag fought a grueling battle with cancer and that she intended to win. Was it your idea or Susan’s to document her struggle?
When she became sick in 1998, her second bout with cancer, I took a couple of months off from work and was in the hospital every day. I think she enjoyed that I was taking pictures. It was something to do while I was in the hospital. There was never a thought about it being a project. If you are a photographer, you take pictures. She wanted to live longer because she wanted to write more books.

You’ve photographed some of the most beautiful people in the world. What do you find beautiful?
If you look in the book and the show, you’ll see landscapes and family. That means the most to me. I don’t profess to be a landscape photographer. I find consolation in looking out and seeing a horizon.

In Sontag’s infamous book On Photography, she wrote: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” How does that statement impact you today?
She said it very well.