Dressed to the nines in a button-down vest and bow tie, a baby-faced Truman Capote lounges on a futon, gazing into the camera with soft lips and a come-hither stare. In the dust jacket of his first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, the author looks more like an underage callboy than an up-and-coming writer. As early as 1947, Capote fetishized himself in an inherently fetishistic medium: the author photo.
Columbia Professor Robert Krauss, a psychologist specializing in gesture communication and a sometime photographer himself, has his own thoughts on dust jacket photos. "Photographs are a version of our self," he said. "The real question is, what is the self that [the authors] are trying to project?"
Highly stylized and idiosyncratic, Tom Wolfe's author photographs rival even Capote's in affectation. In Wolfe's photos (and in real life), the author is a modern-day dandy—he wears his trademark white three-piece suit with a stiff patterned tie, a breast pocket handkerchief, and a perpetual smirk.
But cultivating the aesthetic of a Southern plantation owner can alienate even the most avid literary fan. "I hate that guy. He looks like a total douchebag," said David Patterson, manager of Book Culture and GS '10. "Showmanship seems anathema to literature. Or at least serious literature," he added.
A quick glance at new books shows a trend toward the non-noteworthy. In an unscientific tally, 19 of 35 recent fiction works at Book Culture featured a banal author portrait.
The Brooklyn Writers—a cabal of earnest literary wunderkinds—are the modern counterparts to Capote and Wolfe's affected personas. Preferences include black-rimmed glasses and postmodernism (though the latter doesn't appear in photographs). Members are Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss (who happens to be Safran Foer's wife), and honorary members Benjamin Kunkel (from Manhattan) and Miranda July (from Los Angeles). But unlike Capote and Wolfe, none of these authors' photos suggest an obvious showmanship. Rather, their photos suggest a studied casualness—contrived in its anti-showmanship.
Joshua Ferris leads the pack with his recent debut, Then We Came to The End, a novel that explores the nuances of cubicle life in a Chicago ad agency. In his heavily Photoshopped picture, Ferris looks like a hipster lost in corporate America: he peeks out of a cubicle with messy hair and plastic glasses. Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and a founding editor of literary criticism magazine n+1, is pictured in flip flops, squatting on a damp street. He stares out of the photo absentmindedly as though he can't summon the energy to meet your eyes.
"These are examples of the informal departing from the norm of a conventional studio background and suit jacket. They are all attempts to differentiate themselves," says Professor Krauss.
These anti-establishment author photos are "too precious," Patterson agrees. "Their photos are too premeditated and staged, too self-conscious. It almost detracts from the virtue of their writing."
However, oftentimes the author's dust jacket image is out of his control. James Shapiro, Professor of English and author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, wound up with two different author photos. For the U.S. edition, the publisher insisted that he use its photographer, Jerry Bauer, who has immortalized everyone from Jack Kerouac to Jhumpa Lahiri. But the UK edition features a less Photoshopped version. "I look five or ten years older in this one, and craggier," he says.
"People care deeply," Shapiro adds. "Somebody's circulating thousands of copies of your face."
