Feature

Deconstructing the Author Photo

by Lorie Boucher

"I’m loving it! I’m loving it! Talk to me, baby, talk to me! Work it! Work it! Show me some love. Yeah, that’s it, you’re so smart and literary, yeah, that’s good, with the glasses. Perfect. And ... hold. Beautiful!"

And so the ubiquitous author photo is born.

Let’s be honest. Writers used to be a homely lot and most of them still are. The general unattractiveness that spurs them to write in the first place (versus, say, leaving the house) is compounded by a characteristic, bloodshot squint earned through hours of deciphering Canada Council grant applications and the night before’s Molson marinade, downed to obliterate the rejection-letter blues. Lighting and soft lenses can only hide so much. Yet publishers insist on including the author’s photo on the book jacket, their unsightly portraits like roadside accidents from which you can’t turn away. Trolls belong under the bridge, not on the bridge’s architectural brochure.

Alright, so that’s awful. But in the current publishing climate, suggesting that author photos offend the public’s aesthetic sensibilities is more likely to result in their elimination from book jackets everywhere than, say, proposing that the author photo is the seemingly innocuous launch pad from which all evil is sprung.

The Seemingly Innocuous Launch Pad from which All Evil Is Sprung

Like all consumers, book buyers make purchasing decisions based on their estimation of the value of the product put out for their consumption. Book marketers face a unique challenge in that what is being sold — a reading experience — is not the tangible, take-away item on the shelf. The product is represented by and housed within the thing, but it is not the thing. How, then, is the buyer to estimate the value of unread text? By the number of reviewer accolades? Perhaps, but the odds of a published writer having a few writer friends at one of the dailies would thrill a bookie. The weight of the publishing house? Maybe, but established publishing houses base their title selections on the widest possible market, not individual reader’s tastes. Enter the author photo.

Jim Cox of the Midwest Book Review recommends that publishers include author photos as a marketing tool for three main reasons:

1. Author photos help to sell books.
2. Author photos help to build name recognition.
3. Author photos help TV bookers decide whether the author would be "good television" material.

This is very bad news. But Cox delivers it like a messenger who doesn’t understand the telegram. He continues:

We, as a species, are visually oriented. Nature made us that way. We get most of our sensory data through what we look at. We are conditioned to notice what our fellow homo sapiens look like. We are usually unconscious about how great a role the visual impression of others has upon us in making response judgements.

The "response judgements" to which Cox refers are purchasing decisions. Book buyers are generally unaware of how their visual impressions of a writer affect their choice to buy his or her book. Such is the nature of subconscious manipulation. For that matter, such is the nature of marketing. Playing to our visual sensors is not a new ploy invented to part readers from their money. As a society, we rely on visual shorthand for information in every sphere, from educational puppet shows to television news. In this case, however, the consequences of leaning, even subconsciously, on an unreliable visual crutch (the author photo) to assess the value of an intangible product (the unread text) compromise both the consumer and the producer and in effect, change the industry. And not for the better.

Sitting Pretty

The composition of the author photo is purposely contrived to convey the appropriate authorly attributes specific to his or her genre. It is no accident that Margaret Atwood, queen of Canadian fiction, is photographed with a small, monarchical smile and not Robert Munch’s exclamatory, eye-popping enthusiasm and Where’s Waldo fashion sense. The photo is a kind of visual resumé — it is offered as a testimony to the nature and quality of the book’s contents. The author’s image does not only complement the book, it is the visual encapsulation of the book itself.

Stevie Cameron - [link to http://www.mwandr.com/authors.cfm?view=BOOKS&author_id=226 no longer functions], established journalist and author of the controversial On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years is photographed in conservative, traditional black and white, reminiscent of newsprint. She is photographed from the front, straight on, with an inquisitive, almost confrontational squint. Her expression assures the reader that she will not take anything at face value, but will question and investigate. She is smiling ("I’m nice"), but not too much ("I don’t play games"). Her clothing is classic and conservative. She is not trendy or sensational — she has solid ideas and she has been and will be around for a long time. More than flattering, her photo is successful — it achieves its marketing goals. Cameron personifies the qualities her readers are seeking in her books.

Merilyn Simonds - [link to http://www.mwandr.com/authors.cfm?view=BOOKS&author_id=226 no longer functions], by contrast, is not an investigative journalist, as her photo confirms. Author of The Convict Lover, Simonds embodies the loosened restrictions of creative non-fiction. Here, black and white evokes Yousuf Karsh, not Lloyd Robertson. Simonds’s open-mouthed smile suggests a certain friendliness, a vulnerability that Cameron’s photo does not. Like Cameron, she is photographed head on, but her expression is softer. Her hair is long and loose and a hint of cleavage is visible. Her clothes and jewellery are bohemian and fun, suggesting liberalism and carefreeness. She does, however, appear in glasses, which lend her the credibility that non-fiction requires.

These photos tell us nothing about the books they adorn. Only, perhaps, that they were published by marketing-savvy publishers. The ability to research well cannot be conveyed in an inquisitive squint and literary creativity does not reside in dangly earrings.

A Book by Any Other Name

What Cox calls "name recognition" is called product branding in other industries. Buyers who recognize a product, purport marketing experts, are more likely to buy the same product again. Familiarity breeds confidence. But writers aren’t Aunt Jemima and books aren’t squeeze syrup. There’s a certain unbecoming, halogen-lit, Big Bob’s Bargain Basement quality about a face on a product that does not become a writer, no matter how nice the cover stock. General distastefulness aside, however, this melding of author and product has problematic implications.

When the author literally becomes part of the package, the relationship between the writer and his or her work is cemented in creatively unforgiving ways. Like type-cast actors, authors are linked to a particular genre, the attributes of which he or she has taken great care to personify in his or her author photo. And although visual cues are contrived and misleading, they are memorable. Merilyn Simonds’s current creative image would certainly hinder her assimilation into a parliamentary scrum, just as Stevie Cameron’s no-nonsense navy would keep her out of the underground presses. This is not to say that either writer is not capable of these shifts, but the yoking of the author with a specific type of writing carries professional limitations.

When a name and a product are united in unholy, market-inspired matrimony, the flashbulbs signal the end of anonymity. A photographed author is a recognizable author. Accountability takes on new meaning when strangers are able to challenge a writer on sight. For the radical or controversial writer, a publisher’s decision to include his or her photo on a book jacket could mean constant harassment. Where would Salmon Rushdie be had his image been splashed on covers of The Satanic Verses at the height of the fatwa? Nowhere good. But even in less extreme cases, the author photo reveals the writer to the world. And in today’s fame-obsessed society, recognition ensnares the author in the cult of celebrity.

Baby, You’re a Star!

Author photos, argues Cox, help TV bookers decide whether a writer would be "good television" material. If the photo session is evil’s springboard, the television interview is the final stop on the hell-bound continuum. (Book tours, book signings, and public readings fill the gap in between.) The TV interview appeals to the most basic, correlative thinking: if it looks like a writer and talks like a writer, it must be a writer. A good one, even. Martha, this is not A Good Thing.

What constitutes "good television" material and why is that something a writer should strive for? Television interviews showcase a completely separate skill set than the one required to write the book — the ability to think on one’s feet, to articulate in simple terms what one has laboured so hard to expound upon in writing, and the ability to stomach a slew of uninspired, predictable questions. The talking head on the screen is no more the book than the author photo on the back cover. How do an author’s oral communication skills relate to his or her writing skills? They don’t. How can an author’s interview skills attest to the quality of his or her book? They can’t. But this is hardly the point. People on TV become famous and famous people sell more books.

This is not to say that an author’s perspective on the world, other writers, or his or her own writing do not have value. Television is simply an inappropriate medium to hear it. When Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was launched in 1995, Coupland made it known that he hated phone and in-person interviews and requested e-mail interviews. He had painted what many considered a masterpiece — he simply wasn’t willing to stand in front of it waving his brush. Writers write and readers read. Why not let them?

Damn You, Author Photo

Visual stimuli are a daily assault on our senses and on our intellects. Correlations between dissimilar things are made for us to consume daily, unquestioningly. But there is no relationship between a photo of an author and the text he or she creates. It is a marketing ploy that plays on our basic instinct to assign value to what we see, rather than to expend energy analyzing what is being purposefully contrived for our consumption. Nothing simply exists; everything is created. The author photo is a crutch that readers, the last critical audience in this neon world, should not be encouraged to lean on. It binds the author to his or her text in confining ways and divorces the value of books from its natural union with active, creative thought in favour of the cultish search for fame.

The author photo is a cheat sheet with all of the wrong answers. The smart kids know they still have to study.

Lorie Boucher hates everything. Except contributing to Writer’s Block.