Author's photos: I'm ready for my close up
Um-tiddly-um-pum-um-pum-pum...
Successful writers have long been adept at self-promotion. Stendhal even suggested that “Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness.” Taking advantage of the latest in technology can be particularly helpful, whether that means honing your TikToks or Instagramming your writing shed. Those of you who follow me on the socials will know that I am not averse to some online amour propre.
In the 19th century, the arrival of the photograph was a boon to early adopters such as Charles Dickens. Boz posed for daguerreotypes from the early 1840s onwards and his contemporary Wilkie Collins also used snaps of himself to promote his books, especially The Woman in White. So many of him were taken that he complained about numerous sittings in letters to his mother.
There was in a small but intriguing exhibition - From Studio to Selfie - at the Old Bodleian Library in Oxford a couple of years ago on this very theme. It featured translator Marjory Wardrop (1869-1909) in full traditional Georgian national dress, Alfred, Lord Tennyson in a 1865 shot by Julia Margaret Cameron which he described as the ‘Dirty Monk’, and a selfie by poet Philip Larkin who was also a keen photographer and invented a trigger mechanism to take photos of himself on his Rolleiflex camera. My favourite was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a really impressive false beard, taken in 1912 and used for his Professor Challenger novel, The Lost World. Conan Doyle sits in a group portrait as Challenger himself.
One of the finest practitioners of the art of the author’s book jacket photo was the ‘should be better known’ Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) who boasted a back catalogue including JD Salinger (a particularly moody one of him for The Catcher in the Rye), Thomas Mann and WH Auden.
Although marginally less famous than Salinger, I have been posing for author photos for a couple of decades. I’ve always rather enjoyed having my picture taken although I know many people who wince at the very idea and indeed not all famous folk are overly keen. Charles Darwin was a photography enthusiast though had mixed feelings about having his own picture taken. In his later years, he became particularly reluctant to pose and in 1869 turned down the chance to sit for a photo portrait, explaining that it was "what I hate doing & wastes a whole day owing to my weak health.”
But for me, it’s just a good excuse to put on some smart clothes and try out some of my best smiles. In an excellent piece for The New Yorker a couple of years ago called Decoding the Author Photo, Blythe Robertson runs through some of the classic poses that you’ll find on dust jackets and what they mean such as:
Author Standing in Front of a Brick Wall
The author was going to pay for head shots but then thought, Wait, my friend Pete takes pretty good photos. Why don’t I have him just take a picture of me?
Photo of a Guy in a Scarf
British.
Here’s what I used in my first book, Shedworking, published back in 2010, though I can now reveal that the photo was taken a decade earlier by photographer and artist Valerie de la Dehesa with whom I worked on a magazine in Madrid. Behold!
Of course, these photos are also useful for general promotional purposes, encouraging people on the ‘always judge a book by its cover’ principle to believe the author is a decent person who’d like some of your hard-earned money but not in a needy way. Newspapers and magazines in particular always like a nice, free, high-res smiley head shot to pad out reviews and articles.
Moving on linearly, my co-author on Menus That Made History Vince Franklin is also a keen photographer and very kindly took some nice shots of me in 2017 to update my portfolio. Here’s one I still use regularly.
Which brings me to my latest photo shoot last week at the British Library. This was to accompany an interview about working with the BL which will be part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, so you will be seeing me online and in various email mailouts from them in the coming weeks.
For me, the beauty of the author photo is that it is not set in stone, it is not something that stays with you throughout your career, it allows for some measure of reinvention. Nobody expects you to look like a professional model (though of course you don’t want an actually amateurish photo), but they are interested in what you look like.
Excellent - and as the fellow sufferer of a recent photoshoot I share the self promotion pain