Author, Author
A selection from ‘Writers’, a series by the photographer Steve Pyke
01 December, 2013
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"text": "Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American author and literary journalist, most famous for her non-fiction writing in Slouching towards Bethlehem and The White Album. For her account of a period of grief following the deaths of her husband and her daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking, she was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. (Photographed in New York, 2006)",
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"text": "Gerard Mannix Flynn (b. 1957) is an Irish playwright, writer, actor and politician. His autobiographical novel, Nothing To Say, was a story of a boy sent to a correctional centre and reflected Flynn’s own youth spent in the Marlborough House detention centre and St Patrick’s Institution, Mountjoy. (Photographed in Dublin, 1992)",
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"text": "Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) was an English writer and early queer icon. The first volume of his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, was published in 1968 and was adapted into a TV movie in 1975. The second volume, titled How to Become a Virgin, came out in 1981. (Photographed in London, 1997)",
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"text": "Amiri Baraka (b. 1934) writes poetry, drama, fiction, prose and music criticism. He received the PEN Open Book Award for Tales of the Out and the Gone and was poet laureate of the state of New Jersey for a few months until the post was abolished in 2003 after controversy arose over his poem on 9/11, ‘Somebody Blew up America’. (Photographed in London, 1985)",
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"text": "Céline Curiol (b. 1975) is a French writer whose first novel, Voice Over, published in 2005, was translated into 15 languages. She was a finalist for the International Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009 and is a member of the board of directors of the Maison des Écrivains (House of Writers), Paris. (Photographed in New York, 2008)",
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"text": "Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was an American novelist, poet and feminist writer. Her technique of blurring the lines between originality and plagiarism earned her the epithet “literary terrorist”. (Photographed in New York, 1984)",
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"text": "Sir Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright who has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Some of his best known plays are Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Stoppard co-wrote the screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love. (Photographed in London, 1998)",
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"text": "Jung Chang (b. 1952) is a Chinese-born British writer. She is best known for Wild Swans, a family autobiography that was banned in the People’s Republic of China. Her biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, was published in 2005. (Photographed in London, 1996)",
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"text": "Patti Smith (b. 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, artist and novelist. She was one of the most influential figures of the punk rock movement with a distinctive style of blending spoken word poetry with raw, garage-band-like rock music. Her memoir Just Kids, published in 2010, won the US National Book Award for Nonfiction that year. (Photographed in New York, 2010)",
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"text": "Colm Tóibín (b. 1955) is an Irish novelist, essayist, journalist, critic and poet. In 2004, his novel, The Master, a portrait of Henry James, was named one of the ten most notable books of the year by the New York Times. (Photographed in New York, 2008)",
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"text": "Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998) was an American novelist and journalist. Gellhorn, who was briefly married to Ernest Hemingway, was one of the best-known war correspondents of the 20th century, reporting on every major world conflict that occurred during her 60-year career. (Photographed in London, 1989)",
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"text": "William Woodard “Will” Self (b. 1961) is an English author and journalist. He has written nine novels and three novellas. His novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012. (Photographed in Suffolk, England, 1994)",
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"text": "Doris Lessing (1919–2013) was a British novelist, poet and playwright who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her works include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist and Children of Violence. (Photographed in London, 1996)",
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"text": "Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet and critic. Things Fall Apart, his first and best known novel, is considered the most widely read book in modern African literature. (Photographed in New York, 2008)",
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} IN HIS SEMINAL 1967 ESSAY ‘Death of the Author’, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes stated that “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. … [W]e know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
But curiosity and fascination for the writer refuse to fade. Who are they? How do they think? What are they like? People still attend readings, seek out autographs, and write letters asking what was meant by a particular symbol, a specific turn of phrase.
‘Writers’ is a series of photographs by Steve Pyke that places the author front and centre. Pyke, born in England and based now in New York, became known for his unique portraiture in the 1980s. Since then, he has maintained strong artistic interest in the importance of the face. “The way we live our lives is etched into the landscape of our faces,” he has been oft quoted as saying. “We create the face with which we live.”
In this collection, some of the writers stare directly into the camera, others into the distance. The photographs are in black and white, the writer’s faces against dark backgrounds. Nothing distracts from their features. The starkness deepens the mystery, but also deepens the connection: we are invited to stare into an author’s eyes, to wonder what he or she is trying to say to us.
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