posted on 01 Mar 2023

Portrait of the Writer: Literary Lives in Focus edited with a foreword by Goffredo Fofi

When I first came across this book it felt as if someone had conceived and designed it with my interests specifically in mind. I mean to say, who could resist a book consisting of 250 photographs of great 20th century authors taken by the world’s best photographers and each of them having a dedicated one page biography focussed on their literary significance. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Well, all I can say is that sometimes the idea is better than the reality.

The problem for me is the core idea that is meant to bind this whole confection together. In his opening remarks, Goffredo Fofi makes it clear that the photographs he’s chosen are the products of artists who have been able to dig out aspects of the writer that otherwise might slip past us. It is this premise - that the visual representation provides something essential that words alone cannot always pin down – which is the idea that stops this simply being a random collection of photographs of famous people. While this certainly works in a good many of the profiles, I was left wondering just how much of this enriched biography depends on the reader already having some knowledge of the subject of the portrait or their books.

First published in 2013, Fofi’s foreword clearly sees the book as a contribution to the understanding of the portrait photographers art and, perhaps more doubtfully, to the evolution of 20th century literature. In truth, I tend to use the book as a reference source or as inspiration to take on books or authors I have not tried before. The individual pen-portraits are written as free-standing profiles and there’s no attempt to find any sort of linking narrative between the subjects.

I’m aware that this all sounds very negative but while I think these criticisms are entirely valid, I also have to say that I often pick the book up and spend some time enjoying not just the great photographs but the pen-portraits. There are six other writers, in addition to Fofi himself, who have contributed their considerable knowledge to the profiles: Maria Baiocchi, Guia Boni, Carlo Mazza Galanti, Alessandra Mauro, Isabella Pedicini and Alessia Tagliaventi. The task of expertly capturing a complex literary author’s career and key writings onto a single page a little bigger than A5 is no easy task and I have found most of them to be informative and impressively cogent.

But, inevitably, the photographs will always be the centre of attention and this collection provides a showcase for some of the greats of portraiture. You’ll find Richard Avedon’s wonderful shot of Auden on the streets in the snow, the extraordinary death-bed portrait of Proust taken by Man Ray and Picasso’s photograph of Guillaume Apollinaire, pipe in mouth and flanked by an African statue. The latter, of course, saying more to me about Picasso’s art than Apollinaire’s.

However, there are pictures here that strike me as nothing much more than ordinary – Sandy Nicholson’s portrait of Margaret Atwood and Patrick Zachmann’s Peter Handke, for example, leave me unmoved.

The book itself is published by Thames and Hudson who know how to put together a lovely art book and this one is a pleasing size – a bit of a brick but it sits well in the hand and reads cleanly.

You’ll find second hand copies of the hardback are not overly expensive – under £10 – but the post will add to the cost because of the weight.

 

Terry Potter

March 2023