Update: The talk is sold out. You might like to try showing up in the rain and scalping a few tickets. But I'm sorry to say that might be futile. Sorry to have baited your taste and then to have to stomp on it.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz is in town tonight, giving a talk as part of the Portland Arts & Lectures series.

Her latest book, apparently, weaves celebrity portraits with photo journalism, and I'm interested to hear her talk about being "serious," given that much of her work seems to have consisted of getting famous people to take off more clothes than they might otherwise have chosen to, for a less famous photographer.

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I don't mean that to be glib. There's photographs she's taken that clearly take massive amounts of planning, multiple lighting assistants and the works. Her work can be really impressive without the nudity:

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What I'm interested in, though, is whether the ability to get people to strip and throw knives is accompanied by a disarming frankness in Leibovitz's manner. Is she as interesting as she is famous? As her work is? I hope so. Either way I think it's worth the $12 to find out.