S.F. show presents photographer's portrait of American women.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

SAN FRANCISCO _ Annie Leibovitz's unorthodox portraits of celebrities have been appearing on magazine covers for more than 25 years. With the show "Women" at the Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, she explores a more documentary mode to capture a collective portrait of America's women at the turn of the century. Leibovitz recently spoke about what the project entailed and shared some broader thoughts on the nature of photography.

Q. What's new for you in this show?

A. It was interesting to not be working for a magazine but for myself. You don't realize how much you start to be influenced by where you are working. This brought me back to what originally interested me in photojournalism, which is along the lines of the concerned photographer, doing something that really matters. It's not that I don't love my magazine work, but this was more fulfilling.

Q. This feels like more political work than you've done in the past. Were you aware, as you put together the show, of a feminist responsibility in what the collective work suggested about women?

A. This project had a whole different set of problems. It was important that every portrait be good, but I had this other agenda, of portraying women the right way. I wanted to stay away from separating the way women are portrayed from the way men are portrayed. It was a work in progress. For example, a couple years into it I knew I needed more women in manual labor _ things like that. But, really, it became less about gender and more about individuality. In a way, I don't think there is anything new here. There's nothing that we as a society don't already know on some level.

Q. What do you do in preparation for a portrait session? Do you come in with an idea, or is it more impromptu when you see what's there?

A. All of those things happen. I usually like to know something about who I'm photographing. There were a lot of subjects on this project who were what I'd call unprofessional sitters. They posed different problems. You go and meet them and spend a little time. Most of these people have some little story about them. But they're not as self-conscious as celebrities are. They don't have an agenda and an image they have to be worried about. The celebrities are very conscious of how they are portrayed. On a certain level you have to feel for them. It's their lives.