Closer to Home: The Author and the Author Portrait

Closer to Home: The Author and the Author Portrait fixes its searching and intimate gaze on writers as they have seldom been seen before. These striking images were captured at a location where the writer lives, works or plays. Each is accompanied by a crisp and insightful vignette about the experience of photographing the writer, thoughts about the uses of artists’ portraits, and, often, a touch of refined literary gossip.

Terence Byrnes, whose own collection of short stories, Wintering Over, garnered critical praise, removed himself from the limelight tobehind the camera to photograph other writers. For a period of ten years, he visited writers in their homes and, while discussing the writing life with them, photographed them at their ease. “The literary portrait,” Byrnes says, “had become moribund, showing writers as stalwart or fetching in various degrees, and barricaded by books like a university don from a British novel of manners. These portraits show the photographer as an interloper to whom the writer must react as an individual, not as a role.”

The history of the literary portrait and its place in the creation of commercial success and literary canons will be examined in an introductory critical essay, “The Seductive Frontispiece.”