I love photographs of authors because, perhaps unhelpfully to my reading of their work, I want to feel like I know them. Sure, I’ve read about their guts, but I’ve never understood anything with visual representations. I love diagrams and charts and stupid hopeless scribbles. I love pictures. Authors never look how I think they will. Maybe it’s all the words getting to me.
I chose to highlight these photographs of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein (Transition magazine, Fall 1928, Vol. 14) because they are both odd, and that interests me. Today’s photographs of authors are concerned primarily with marketability and associated values — such as looking intelligent. Cue the woman with a black turtleneck, posed softly in an ancient library. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely less interesting to me than this picture of Williams, where in my opinion he looks downright unsettling. The deep shadow hiding his eyes, his absolutely neutral standing position, neither smiling nor frowning. The ambiguity of everything gives me chills. And I love it. I watch horror movies for the same reason. Almost everything that unsettles is interesting. Anyone can tell you I hate to be bored.