Looking the part

John O'Connell

• Last Updated: April 06. 2009 4:24PM UAE / April 6. 2009 12:24PM GMT

The photographer Marion Ettlingers 1996 portrait of the writer Jonathan Franzen. Marion Ettlinger / Corbis

A couple of years ago, I interviewed the novelist Jonathan Franzen at a hotel in West London. We got talking about his rapid ascent to literary celebrity following the success of The Corrections and he admitted that his initial response to it had been to ignore the press coverage completely – to avoid reading interviews or reviews or comment pieces relating to the book. But asceticism is a tough pose to strike, and before long he’d given in.

“For two days in the fall of 2001, I actually looked at the stuff on the internet about myself,” he said. “A lot of fun was had by those early bloggers comparing a particularly atrocious Associated Press picture of me with the carefully chiaroscuroed one on the dust jacket. The degree of analysis of my self-promotional psychology was breathtaking and I found out all sorts of things about myself that I didn’t know. It took a few months before I realised that the reason I didn’t know them was because they weren’t true.”

Of course, as Shakespeare tells us, “there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”. But we like to think there is, which is why there was such a fuss last month when the so-called Cobbe portrait of Shakespeare was claimed to be the only one painted in his lifetime and therefore the most “authentic” image of the Bard.

The Cobbe portrait shows Shakespeare with flushed cheeks and a full head of hair – not how we imagined him at all. Our sense of what Shakespeare looked like is based largely on the Droeshout engraving which adorns the First Folio, published seven years after his death in 1616. Showing him with a receding hairline and bulbous forehead (presumably to accommodate his enormous brain), it’s such an iconic image that it’s hard to accept its unreliability. But accept it we must. In any case, why do we care what Shakespeare looked like? Why does it matter? We have the plays and the poems. Aren’t they enough?

As little as 60 years ago, the casual reader curious to know what, say, Auden, looked like would have had few opportunities to find out. The author tour, though invented by Dickens, had yet to catch on, so all you could do was watch the newspapers in the hope that a review or story might be illustrated with a photograph. Otherwise you had to rely solely on the picture on the dust-jacket (if your book was a hardback and possessed one) or the back of the paperback – typically, a small, passportish affair perched atop an evasive sliver of biography.

The dust jacket photo remains a crucial promotional device. In fact, says Antonia Hodgson, the editor-in-chief at the publisher Little, Brown, it’s more important than ever.

“The author photo is now just the beginning of a process of getting to know the author,” she says. “These days readers want to know everything. It all started in the mid 1990s when quite suddenly you had many more opportunities to interact with writers – a lot more festivals and author tours. Nowadays, woe betide the author who doesn’t keep his blog up to date.”

In the UK, the author photo is often chosen and supplied to the publisher by the author. Sometimes, budget permitting, there will be the chance of a shoot with a professional photographer. The system is different in the United States, where professional photographers are almost always used by mainstream publishers. This is why US authors tend to appear, in Hodgson’s words, “groomed to a fault: The women end up looking like TV anchorwomen, with white teeth and padded shoulders”.

The photo Franzen referred to in our conversation was taken by Greg Martin. But he could have been talking about an even worse one, taken in 1996 by Marion Ettlinger, doyenne of US author portraits. It shows Franzen seated at a table in what might be a cafe. On one side: an old-fashioned Bakelite telephone. On the other: a squiggly modernist standard lamp. (What could Ettlinger be trying to suggest? Thinking caps on, team…) Franzen is scowling – there’s no other word for it – at the camera, as any of us would under the circumstances.

Ettlinger is so famous, she has her own verb. To be “Ettlingered”, according to The New York Times, means “to have imparted to you an aura of distinction and renown, regardless of whether anyone besides your mother and your cat knows who you are”. In a 2003 interview with mediabistro.com, Ettlinger explained that she was drawn to photographing writers “because of their inner life and their intellect, which are invisible to the eye… That juxtaposition of the inside and the outside I felt was an interesting challenge and I wanted to explore that.”

Ettlinger’s explorations tend to involve making her subjects look like they’ve been carved out of wax, then spray-painted silver. The effect is glamourising, for sure, but also distancing. Photographed by her, even the late David Foster Wallace – unshaven, wearing an old coat and T-shirt – looks like Val Kilmer playing David Foster Wallace in a biopic. Meanwhile, her portrait of Jhumpa Lahiri projects none of the Namesake author’s beauty – just a sleek, rather ottery efficiency.

For this writer at least, the Ettlinger treatment frequently prevents authors from “looking how they should”. But what does that actually mean? How should an author look?

It depends on the book they’ve written, says Antony Topping, a literary agent at Greene & Heaton in London which represents PD James, Sarah Waters and Bill Bryson.

“With chicklit, reader-author identification is very important,” Topping says. “Readers want to see if the author looks a bit like them.”

Otherwise, it’s best to look like, well, the sort of person who might have written the book in question: “If you’re an august historian, it helps if you look like an august historian.”

Hodgson thinks Joanne Harris is the perfect example of an author whose image encapsulates her work: “She looks earthy, fabulous, a bit French – exactly how I want the author of Chocolat to look.” One publishing insider admits that, in cases where an author’s appearance is judged to be incompatible with his book, a photo is not used on the dust jacket or supplied to the media unless specifically requested.

In literary publishing at least, the writing is supposed to be more important than whether the writer is easy on the eye. And it is – sort of. At the same time, nothing can be left to chance in a climate where media coverage for literary novelists is harder than ever to secure.

“There was a case recently where I was submitting a proposal to an editor and the author had asked me to include a photo of herself,” says one top agent. “It made me feel uncomfortable because, to my mind, it distracted from the writing. It implied that the writing wasn’t the most important thing. I’m happy to say to an editor on the phone that a writer is – hilarious euphemism – ‘mediagenic’, but not to include physical evidence in a submission.”

Just occasionally, everything comes together with giddy ease. Take Zadie Smith, the pre-eminent literary novelist of her generation and ludicrously good looking. From the start, she understood modern publishing’s unsavoury realpolitik and in the covering letter that helped secure her representation by the prestigious Wylie Agency wrote: “I’m six foot tall, I’m 19 years old and I don’t exactly look like the back end of a bus.”

The novelist Toby Litt, whose latest book, Journey Into Space, has just been published by Hamish Hamilton, signed with Penguin in the late 1990s around the same time as Smith. He remembers well the day they were both sent by Penguin’s marketing department to have their photos taken. “It was a proper studio somewhere near Old Street in London. I met Zadie at the station. I’d got some new clothes, but she was wearing some old black mohair thing and her glasses. When the time came, I remember saying to her, ‘You should give those a wipe, they’re a bit smudgy’. Anyway, the photos came back and I looked like a blob. But Zadie! Zadie’s picture was this iconic image of a literary babe – the very definition of photogenic. It was her dust jacket photo for quite a while.”

Litt, whose first book, Adventures in Capitalism, was published in 1997, has had several dust jacket photos in his time. “A good one was by Steve Pyke who uses a Leica with a lens designed for shooting botanical samples. It has a very narrow depth of field, so you get one eye in focus and the other not. A guy called Jerry Bauer shot me in my flat. He collected writers – he was quite big-game-hunterish about it, as a lot of photographers are. I was determined not to be impressed, but then he told me he’d done Beckett and Foucault and I thought: Oh, OK.”

Author portraits don’t have to be great art. No one is expecting Julia Margaret Cameron’s mesmerising 19th-century photographs of Tennyson and Carlyle. But too many are worse than they should be – drably functional, hectic with cliché.

“You often see fingers over the chin or the hand cupping the chin, especially if the author is overweight,” says one editor. “I remember one writer I worked with in the mid-1990s where we were still using a photo of her from the early 1980s. There was some concern that the blouse she was wearing was out of fashion, but then around 1997 a funny thing happened: it came back into fashion in a retro, Jarvis Cocker sort of way and looked all right again.”

Not everyone sees the point of dust jacket photos. “Generally, I’ve already invested in a book on the strength of other things like the cover design,” says Topping. “Though I suppose it’s possible that, a hundred pages into something, I might think, ‘Hmm, I wonder what this person looks like?’ and flip to the back.”

A broader issue is that authors aren’t generally mediagenic. Many dislike being photographed, perhaps because they’re scared of what the pictures might give away – the anxieties about worth and status that all novelists, especially, struggle with. As people who “read” the world in unsparing detail in order to convert it into fiction, they know how these photos will be read: as windows into their souls or, less flatteringly, declarations of intent from which their “self-promotional psychology”, such as it is, can be divined.

Litt puts it well: “You have to look bigger, on your dust jacket, than you’re comfortable with being as a writer, which is someone who sits at a desk and isn’t looked at. But you flare up for a moment and the photographer captures you as that thing.”