Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Photography General

Closer to Home

The Author and the Author Portrait

text by Terence Byrnes

Publisher
Vehicule Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2008
Category
General, Portraits, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781550652482
    Publish Date
    Sep 2008
    List Price
    $29.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781550652505
    Publish Date
    Nov 2008
    List Price
    $59.95

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

Closer to Home: The Author and the Author Portrait fixes its searching and intimate gaze on writers as they have seldom been seen before. These striking images were captured at a location where the writer lives, works or plays. Each is accompanied by a crisp and insightful vignette about the experience of photographing the writer, thoughts about the uses of artists' portraits, and, often, a touch of refined literary gossip.

Terence Byrnes, whose own collection of short stories, Wintering Over, garnered critical praise, removed himself from the limelight tobehind the camera to photograph other writers. For a period of ten years, he visited writers in their homes and, while discussing the writing life with them, photographed them at their ease. "The literary portrait," Byrnes says, "had become moribund, showing writers as stalwart or fetching in various degrees, and barricaded by books like a university don from a British novel of manners. These portraits show the photographer as an interloper to whom the writer must react as an individual, not as a role."

The history of the literary portrait and its place in the creation of commercial success and literary canons will be examined in an introductory critical essay, "The Seductive Frontispiece."

About the author

Terence Byrnes is internationally known as a fine art photographer as well as a writer. His literary portraits have appeared worldwide, and their distinctive look is becoming a new hallmark for the visual representation of Canadian writers.

Terence Byrnes' profile page