Author Photo: Portraits, 1983-2002

By Marion Ettlinger

Book Overview

The writing life has long captured our collective imagination. What is it about writers, we wonder, that empowers them to work words into shapes and patterns that move us? The most affecting photographs possess that same power -- to reach out upon first sight, to capture our hearts and minds, to leave us smitten.
Such is the feeling that comes from gazing at the work of Marion Ettlinger, a photographer celebrated for her "literary portrait power" (The Wall Street Journal). Author Photo collects, for the first time in book form, more than two hundred of Ettlinger's most famous photographs. Immortalized in these pages are many of America's greatest writers, including Raymond Carver, Francine Prose, Walter Mosley, Mary Karr, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Highsmith, Ken Kesey, Edwidge Danticat, and Jeffrey Eugenides.
According to one of Ettlinger's Pulitzer Prize-winning subjects, "starkness and a sense of shadows" are at the core of her artistic allure. Shot exclusively in natural light and in black-and-white film, each of these images is an intimate artwork, putting the reader closer than ever before to the writers they revere and admire. A photographic paean to the literary spirit, Author Photo opens a rare and revealing window onto the timelessness of creativity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1451656157
• ISBN13: 9781451656152
• Release Date: February 2015
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.4" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

Great book

This 173-page hard cover book features more than 200 B & W portraits of authors. Good quality paper and print. Although the portraits in this book are highly manipulated, yet they represent a specific photographic style and an era. The artist has full command of the medium and the technology. Her ability to use available light to bring her photographs to life is remarkable. The techniques use to create Ronald Steet's photo as well Ron Rosenbaum's in 1983 are quite different from those use to create David Gates's in 2001. Marion has succeeded in revealing her subjects personalities in these remarkable photographs.

Author Photo: Portraits, 1983-2002

Marion Ettlinger is one of the few contemporary artists left in the field of photography. This is a brilliant overview of her work and an exciting insight into the world of some of our great writers.