No guns in our house/Welcome to hard times
This is from Alec Soth’s blog:
It is interesting how the cover images affect our reading of the book. But equally influential is the author photograph. In discussing the under-appreciation of Alice Munro in the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote, “her jacket photos show her smiling pleasantly, as if the reader were a friend, rather than wearing the kind of woeful scowl that signifies really serious literary intent.” Franzen makes a good point.
and (Ettlinger took the second photo)
Marion Ettlinger. Ettlinger is so successful as a photographer that she has her own verb. “To be ‘Ettlingered’ 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,” wrote the New York Times.
For the record, Franzen has updated his portrait. Just as he avoided the Oprah Book Club, he now shies away from Ettlinger. I can understand why. Ettllinger is a good photographer. But there is something off-putting about her relentless effort to make authors look like, well, Authors. Others have been more blunt in their criticism.
Dennis Loy Johnson writes:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’m not sure what words are behind Marion Ettlinger’s photographs, except perhaps “My shoes are too tight.” You could say her photos represent yet another discouragement of intellectualism in modern literature. Or you could say they just prove the power of faceless storytelling — the story about that emperor who wore no clothes, for example.
The New York Times profile of Ettlinger suggests the problem with her pictures is that they were produced specifically to market books:
A portrait’s function is to have no function except the representation of the subject. Julia Margaret Cameron’s celebrated photographs of Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle are portraits. So are Bernice Abbott’s iconic pictures of James Joyce. The subjects of those pictures acquired, through their work — or through titanic expectation that became a kind of original work itself — reputations that had become larger than their writing. Thus their images could acceptably appear independent of a dust jacket. Ettlinger’s pictures, however, are made expressly to adorn book jackets. Their function is to be, as it were, purely functional — informative, curiosity-satisfying. They are absolutely dependent on the publication of the book, which is a one-time event.
Thoughts?
John Madera
John Dermot Woods
Ryan W. Bradley
Michael Leong
Greg Gerke
Stacy Muszynski
A D Jameson
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Rachel Swirsky
Edward Mullany
Aya Karpinska
Paul Kincaid
davis schneiderman
Amber Sparks
Tim Horvath
John Domini
Elaine Castillo
Curtis White
Paula Bomer
James Tadd Adcox
Nick Francis Potter
Brian Kubarycz
Gabriel Blackwell
Janey Smith
Matty Byloos
J/J Hastain
Greg Hunter
Jeff Bursey
Paul Griffin
Chris Lites
I like that Alice Munro’s photos are all smiley laughy and then she writes some of the darkest stories about our souls and hearts. I find the incongruity funny.
Ettlinger. I will say this- you always know it’s one of her portraits. I like some of them.
So funny…
Her book with all the author photos is pretty fun to flip through. It’s a good analog/analogy to the 60 writers/60 places film. Are they more true in that film or Ettlingered?
This is terrific. Thanks, Greg. Author photos are something I probably think about too much, but I was just reading that conversation between Miranda July and James Franco (who’s getting a fiction MFA?!) in the new McSweeney’s, in which they both talk about reading books and flipping to the author photo throughout their reading, going, “Wait, who’s this guy again?” And I do that to.
Wanna know I secret? I get annoyed when people used childhood pictures as their author photo. Feels like a cop-out or something.
I am not annoyed when people choose not to use a picture.
I like it when author photos have a different poem than you’d expect for a work – a la Alice Munro.
That anecdote comes as no real surprise, as both MJ and JF are (among all the other things that they are) obviously obsessed with images.
But Agassi said it, image is everything. I had people tell me they read a certain book because they liked the author photo.
I myself believe that image is 57% of it.
I like the line taken from the NY Times profile: “A portrait’s function is to have no function except the representation of the subject.” But that’s difficult to achieve, no? Are there many good portrait photographers out there? Here are two portraits of Truman Capote by the late Richard Avedon:
Truman Capote, young: http://bit.ly/aL0VWo
Truman Capote, old: http://bit.ly/9YzCHi
Capote said of Avedon: he’s interested in “the mere condition of the face.”
“A portrait’s function is to have no function except the representation of the subject.”
Really? Isn’t that a snapshot, not a portrait?
Paul – maybe you’re right. It’s a funny line. I understood “representation” to refer less to the arbitrary quality of a snapshot and more to the controlled quality of a portrait.
But that would suggest a portrait is doing far more than merely representing the subject. Because an adequate representation of the subject must also represent their context, their relationship with the world, their understanding of self, and so on. And that, to me, is a function far beyond the ‘no function’ the passage is talking about.
Similarly, Ettinger’s portraits (for which I hold no great brief), have a function beyond the mere decorative, since they represent the author’s understanding of self and relationship with the world through their relationship with their book. Which is precisely the broader representation the writer is apparently denying.
Good point. Some portraits are able to dispense with context, though, and still communicate something about the subject.
Here is Iggy Pop, by Martin Schoeller:
http://bit.ly/91ab9B
I might never have seen or heard of Iggy Pop before, but looking at this picture I could intuit something about him from the way the artist has observed the ‘geography’ of his face.
I think we all know that the author’s portrait is intended to help sell the book. Even when people include one out of knee-jerk adherence to convention.
I’m not saying this is entirely a bad thing, mind you. I’m for selling books. And seeing what authors look like. But I think it’s good to be upfront about such things.