Do author photos really matter?
By Marjorie Kehe | 04.08.09
Do readers really care what an author looks like? Apparently so – and neither are authors exactly indifferent to the image created by that dust-jacket photo.
In today’s NPR piece today about author photos, Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer agrees that it’s an uncomfortable idea but he admits that some in the business believe that books by good-looking authors will garner more reviews.
Like it or not, the NPR piece concludes, today the author photo is essential.
Earlier this week the UAE’s English-language publication the National also did a piece on author photos. Both the National story and the NPR piece mention Marion Ettlinger, referred to by the National as, “the doyenne of US author portraits.”
(”Ettlinger is so famous, she has her own verb,” continues the National story. “To be ‘Ettlingered,’ according to The New York Times, means ‘to have imparted to you an aura of distinction and renown, regardless of whether anyone besides your mother and your cat knows who you are.’ “)
In an NPR interview, Ettlinger tells of shooting an evocative photo of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest.” The National includes the story of a striking photo she took of “Corrections” author Jonathan Franzen.
But of course, says book blogger Jessica Crispin, too much can be made of the author photo. It’s certainly jarring, she points out, to meet authors in person – only to discover that in real life they look nothing like that dust-jacket portrait.
Comments
2. Jean-Louis Taffarelli | 04.09.09
Dear Wes,
Applying strictly your system you would never have read any author who lived before the invention of photography.
You would certainly have missed some tremendous books.
Best regards
3. John | 04.09.09
Well there were such things as portraits before photography, and they can play a similar if not identical role in giving us an idea not only of what an author looked like but also what type of person he or she might have been.
When I find myself interested in or drawn to an author’s work, rare is the time I don’t try to find a photo or painting to give me a better idea of the person behind the writing. Why I do this I don’t exactly know, but the words after all haven’t spilled out of nowhere–they come from a usually identifiable source, and it’s perfectly natural we would want to look at and perhaps even study that source.
And I can understand why readers might wish to see what an author looks like before starting a book. I suspect we do this not in order to read only good-looking authors, but rather to gain some idea of the author’s character (something a good authorial portrait should be effective at conveying). Think of Facebook…just because our profiles there don’t necessarily present us as we really are doesn’t mean one can’t learn quite a bit about the way in which we wish to present ourselves.
I hadn’t thought much about this artistic genre before! It’d be neat to know a bit more about all that goes into the selection of a “successful” dusk-jacket portrait.
4. Lavanna Martin | 04.10.09
I remember reading Walker Percy’s “The Last Gentleman” many years ago, and longing to know what this man looked like.
thank you,
~Lavanna Martin
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1. Wes Bockley | 04.08.09
“Never judge a book by it’s cover” is an aphorism I have found rarely true –because it does tell a lot. Authors photos are an even stronger indicator of our ability to connect with a book. We make a lot of decisions based on appearances and they are usually correct. In college my English major friends and I relied heavily on photos when choosing new authors. Unless the author had the “intelligence filled aura” of say a Samuel Beckett, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Conner. William Faulkner, etc, we would put it down. True, I may have missed a tremendous novel or great poetry by someone who looks like a cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys — but I’ll take my chances. Then again, any of the above mentioned authors wouldn’t make the first cuts for my schools cheerleading squad. I can’t image them building a human pyramid or chanting over and over, “Push’em back, push’em back — wayyyyyyyy back.”