Ransom Center Magazine

Harry Ransom Center

Photographer Laura Wilson delves into the lives of writers with stunning portraits

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Off the Page

by LAURA WILSON

In late fall of 2008, I met John Updike and liked him—And thought then I’d like to do a portrait of him. But I dithered, and he died the following January before I had the chance. Earlier, I had seen some photographs taken by Dennis Stock of Updike in 1962 on the beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Updike, in street clothes, was at the edge of the waves, trying to get as close as possible without getting wet. The pictures were like stills from a home movie of a famous grown-up playing a children’s game by the sea.

Updike’s abrupt death prompted me to begin photographing writers in earnest. Over the course of 12 years, I was lucky enough to photograph some of the most influential writers of our time, women and men who will leave a lasting literary legacy.

We’ve all seen writers on the dust jackets of their books. These portraits, it seemed to me, generally failed to convey either character or personality. Writers deserve better. I wanted to make compelling pictures that would stick in the mind’s eye. My own photographic style is informal, inspired by the classic photo-essays of Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith in LIFE magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. So, I set about taking candid shots, as well as more composed pictures.

Marjan Satrapi
Marjan Satrapi in Paris, France, July 2021. © Laura Wilson

I chose each person for the quality of their work. As often as not, I had never seen a particular writer before we met. But as I began to edit the film, I saw immediately that no matter how each one appeared to me at first, when they came before the camera, they all appeared exceptional. Their faces were full of meaning.

What is it that gives them such presence? How is it that writers, unlike any other group I’ve photographed, are so calmly centered, so seemingly free of anxiety? Don’t most of us feel a certain level of discomfort when being photographed? But these writers seemed able to part the curtain of self-doubt. They were all highly accomplished and well aware of their reputations. Of course, having a portrait made takes little of the toll of writing. But what made these writers unusual, I believe, was their ability to go beyond the “picture face” that most of us present to the camera, to dig into themselves to reveal something of the human predicament. Tom Stoppard gave me 15 minutes on a London sidewalk, when usually I would have had hours or days. We spent eight of those minutes searching for a quiet location in Covent Garden that would be suitable for the portrait. Once we found the spot, Stoppard looked directly into my camera, and in less than a minute, I knew I had the picture. The playwright had given me a gift—a look filled with emotion, heartbreaking and wonderful.

Group of people
Rachel Cusk (at left with friends), Stiffkey, Norfolk, England, October 2018. © Laura Wilson

I made a portrait of each writer, then added photographic reportage to show where each person lived or worked or gathered with friends. Their private territories were full of objects and details that reflected their daily lives, those things that inspire and comfort them. By showing a combination of portraits and snapshots, I hoped to create a fresh series of pictures for each writer and provide insight into their singular personalities.

All the writers lived in interesting houses; some were uncommon, others were splendid, none was mundane. Their houses were in cities, in the countryside, by the sea, and even in remote borderlands. Not one of the writers seemed to have simply landed in a place by accident. Their locations were as specific as their writing styles. Upon visiting many of them at home, I found each to be visual in the extreme. And I was never disappointed, finding invariably a person of wide-ranging curiosity whose surroundings reflected a perceptive eye.

To give my subjects an idea of what I needed, I showed them a selection of photographs I’d taken of other writers for the book. Each of them seemed to enjoy looking at the pictures of the others, moving slowly through the entire batch. Holding one photo, Peter Carey noticed a tiny figure of Colm Tóibín, walking by the Irish Sea, barely recognizable in the far distance. “Oh, is that Colm?” Carey asked. Then, the next picture: Tóibín up close, sitting in a chair with his arms on top of his head, looking directly into the camera. “Ah, yes, you got it! Colm has such a good face.”

Sam Shepard asked, “May I keep this print?” When he looked at the photograph of Thomas McGuane on horseback. “He was really good to let me fish on his ranch.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York, New York, January 2022. © Laura Wilson

Gabriel García Márquez looked through all the photographs without a word, finally holding up one of August Kleinzahler dancing a little jig down the aisle of Amoeba Music in San Francisco. With a quick shake of his hand, he let me know this particular shot surprised and amused him.

Carlos Fuentes said that throughout history, people had been faceless until photography was invented. He used the word revolution. People had a face for the first time, an identity. As I watched the writers’ reactions as they looked through my photographs, I sensed they felt as I do about photography—it’s magic. Tim O’Brien even practices magic, entertaining his two sons with a magician’s skill. O’Brien said that for him, writing is another form of magic—invention, transformation, sleight of hand, all taking reality to another level—just like a photograph.

The rainy morning when I photographed Jim Crace on Mount Bonnell, about 700 feet above the Colorado River in Austin, he was reciting to himself lines from a Philip Larkin poem about photography and memory and lacerations of the heart. Larkin wrote that “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.”

Richard Ford
Richard Ford, East Boothbay, Maine, July 2010. © Laura Wilson

The writer takes up his pen, the artist his brush, the photographer his camera, each intent on halting the passage of time, the disappearance of memory. Pablo Picasso caught the brutality of the Spanish Civil War forever when he painted Guernica, just as Robert Capa, with his grainy, blurred images of the invasion of Normandy, recorded for all time the pitiless slaughter of men at war.

For me, photography has always been a way to stave off loss… loss of family, loss of place, even loss of memory. We know life is finite. “Death is the great Maecenas,” Carlos Fuentes said, “the great angel of writing.” To work to record, to preserve what we saw and heard and felt, is the strongest impulse of the creative mind, a defiant gesture against time. The true artist is driven to take pictures, or arrange words, or draw lines. So much of life, of creativity, comes from the desire for permanence.

Laura Wilson’s photographs have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and London’s Sunday Times Magazine, among others. She has published six books of photographs and text including Avedon at Work, Grit and Glory, That Day: Picture in the American West, and From Rodin to Plensa.

The Exhibition

by HARRY RANSOM CENTER

Photographer Laura Wilson has photographed some of the most influential writers of our time. Drawn from her new book, The Writers: Portraits by Laura Wilson (Yale University Press, 2022), the exhibition at the Ransom Center is a selection of her powerful portraits documenting highly accomplished, award-winning writers. Immersing herself in each writer’s own personal setting, Wilson reveals the details that have inspired their literary masterworks.

In the galleries, visitors can view stunning photographic portraits of authors such as J. M. Coetzee, Jim Crace, Rachel Cusk, Edwidge Danticat, Louise Erdrich, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Tim O’Brien, Zadie Smith, and Tom Stoppard, among many others.

Visitors in exhibition gallery
The Writers: Portraits by Laura Wilson August 27, 2022 – December 30, 2022.

“Do these photographs get at the question every writer is asked a thousand times within a life span—what makes you write these books?” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich (The Night Watchman, 2020) in the introduction to the Wilson’s book (she also is one of Wilson’s subjects). “These photographs make writers seem suspiciously normal. Yet something happens when Laura Wilson goes back to her photography studio and we sit down to write. We tap into the ancient pleasures of storytelling and at the same time take on the human struggle against the obvious.”

The exhibition will be on view through January 1, 2023.

 

TOP IMAGE: Tom Stoppard in London, 2019. © Laura Wilson

“Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Dog

by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

The dog trots freely in the street

and sees reality

and the things he sees

are bigger than himself

and the things he sees

are his reality

Drunks in doorways

Moons on trees

The dog trots freely thru the street

and the things he sees

are smaller than himself

Fish on newsprint

Ants in holes

Chickens in Chinatown windows

their heads a block away

The dog trots freely in the street

and the things he smells

smell something like himself

The dog trots freely in the street

past puddles and babies

cats and cigars

poolrooms and policemen

He doesn’t hate cops

He merely has no use for them

and he goes past them

and past the dead cows hung up whole

in front of the San Francisco Meat Market

He would rather eat a tender cow

than a tough policeman

though either might do

And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory

and past Coit’s Tower

and past Congressman Doyle

He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower

but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle

although what he hears is very discouraging

very depressing

very absurd

to a sad young dog like himself

to a serious dog like himself

But he has his own free world to live in

His own fleas to eat

He will not be muzzled

Congressman Doyle is just another

fire hydrant

to him

The dog trots freely in the street

and has his own dog’s life to live

and to think about

and to reflect upon

touching and tasting and testing everything

investigating everything

without benefit of perjury

a real realist

with a real tale to tell

and a real tail to tell it with

a real live

               barking

                            democratic dog

engaged in real

                          free enterprise

with something to say

                                     about ontology

something to say

                             about reality

                                                  and how to see it

                                                                            and how to hear it

with his head cocked sideways 

                                                  at streetcorners

as if he is just about to have

                                               his picture taken

                                                                           for Victor Records

                                  listening for

                                                      His Master’s Voice

                      and looking

                                         like a living questionmark

                                                                        into the

                                                                     great gramaphone

                                                                   of puzzling existence

                 with its wondrous hollow horn

                         which always seems

                     just about to spout forth

                                                            some Victorious answer

                                                                      to everything

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (American, 1919–2021) was a poet, essayist, activist, and co-founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. He was also a prolific visual artist. The Ransom Center recently acquired a collection of Ferlinghetti’s sketchbooks, paintings, drawings, and prints, including original cover designs for two books of his poetry. A sampling of this acquisition, a generous gift and partial purchase from the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Artworks Trust, is on display this fall in the Ransom Center’s gallery.

Image: Photo of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Books editorial office, San Francisco. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Estate and used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

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by GEOFFREY S. SMITH

A Fragment Makes History

A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.

The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.

The world first learned about the Willoughby Papyrus in January of 2015, when it appeared for sale on eBay in a no-reserve auction with bidding starting at $99.99. Within hours, the listing caught the attention of scholars worldwide who blogged about it and shared links to the auction on social media. While manuscripts do appear on eBay from time to time, this was not a typical listing. In contrast to the crude forgeries that surface on the site, the Willoughby Papyrus looked authentic. It also did not resemble the illicit papyri that occasionally appear on eBay, unmounted, unidentified, and often sprinkled with a suspicious layer of dirt, as if recently pulled from the sands of Egypt.

Instead, the Willoughby Papyrus sat in an older professional mount and included a label identifying it as John 1:50-51. Greek papyri of the New Testament are rare—today only 141 have been published, and among these, only about 30 contain the Gospel of John. Yet because Greek papyri tend to be the earliest New Testament manuscripts, they are among the most important for establishing the original words written by the New Testament authors. Could this be an authentic and legitimate papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John? The listing seemed too good to be true, but I had to learn more about the manuscript.

I couldn’t let the papyrus slip into private hands. Something like this belongs at a university or in a museum, where it can be properly conserved and made available to experts for study.
—GEOFFREY SMITH

I immediately contacted the seller. During the course of a lengthy email exchange, a fuller story began to emerge. The owner discovered the papyrus in his attic. It was among a jumble of papers he’d inherited years earlier but only recently decided to look through. In the owner’s words, “I recently took time to go through [the suitcase] and [the papyrus] fell out from a stack of letters/papers.” The owner thought it would fetch a few dollars on eBay, but he was not prepared for the onslaught of attention it received. His inbox was flooded with emails from scholars like me trying to find out more about the papyrus, as well as wealthy private collectors offering exorbitant amounts of money to “buy it now.”

Harold R. Willoughby’s manuscript collection inventory
Inventory of Harold R. Willoughby’s personal manuscript collection, written in his own hand.

The seller also disclosed that the papyrus once belonged to Harold Willoughby, professor of early Christian origins at the University of Chicago. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Willoughby worked with his colleague Edgar J. Goodspeed to acquire manuscripts from dealers and private collectors in the United States and abroad for the University of Chicago. Willoughby would even recall an experience that “brought gangland suddenly near,” when he purchased for the university a Greek lectionary that was formerly used as an oath Bible for patrons of Colosimo’s Cafe, a Chicago restaurant owned and operated by notorious mobster Jim Colosimo. The seller provided documentation that the papyrus belonged to Harold Willoughby, who died in 1962, which meant that the fragment fully complied with the 1970 UNESCO convention of cultural property.

I couldn’t let the papyrus slip into private hands. Something like this belongs at a university or in a museum, where it can be properly conserved and made available to experts for study. After further discussion, the seller agreed and ended the auction before it sold. He graciously allowed me to
inspect the fragment and publish some preliminary findings.

The papyrus itself turned out to be as exceptional as the circumstances of its discovery. One particularly interesting feature is its format: The Willoughby Papyrus is the first known example of a New Testament papyrus written on a scroll. The vast majority of New Testament papyri take the form of the codex, that is, the book in its modern format.

The few New Testament papyrus scrolls that do survive are written on the back of existing scrolls. They are not scrolls by design, but instead take the form of the book they are repurposing. But the scribe of our papyrus seems to have wanted his copy of the Gospel of John to be a scroll. Christians are well known to have been early adopters of the codex, even while Jews and non-Christian Romans seemed to prefer the scroll. But since the first Jesus followers were not yet members of a distinct Christian religion, but members of a sect within Judaism, scholars surmise that there must have been a time—very early on—when New Testament writings were routinely written on scrolls. As the sole example of a Greek New Testament papyrus copied onto the front side of a scroll, the Willoughby Papyrus has much to reveal about Jewish and Christian relations in the ancient world and the history of the early Christian book.

This fragment has much to teach us about Christianity’s early centuries, and thanks to the generous support of a UT alum, the Willoughby Papyrus now has a permanent home in the Harry Ransom Center, where scholars and visitors alike can view and study this remarkable early Christian artifact.

Image: The Willoughby Papyrus, a manuscript fragment from the third or fourth century CE containing text from John 1:49–2:1.

ABOUT GEOFFREY S. SMITH

Geoffrey S. Smith is Associate Professor, Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

My Friend Bill Yellow Robe

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by JACE WEAVER

The Harry Ransom Center is proud to hold the papers of playwright and poet William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. A member of the Assiniboine Tribe, Yellow Robe was a lecturer at the University of Maine and the award-winning author of Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, Wood Bones, and Better-n-Indins. He died in 2021 at the age of 61. The papers, a recent gift from Yellow Robe’s wife, Jeanne, include drafts, rehearsal scripts, letters, photographs, publicity material, critical reviews, digital files, notebooks and more. We are grateful to Jeanne Domek Yellow Robe and Deborah Murad at DGCM, who is managing the licensing of Yellow Robe’s work.

The following tribute to William Yellow Robe is written by his friend Jace Weaver, founding director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. Dr. Weaver edited and introduced an anthology of Yellow Robe’s plays, Restless Spirits, with SUNY Press in 2020.

Sometimes you meet someone and you know immediately you’ve met a friend for life. Though I had known Bill Yellow Robe’s work for two decades, we had never met until I went on Facebook about six years ago. I ran across Bill, and we instantly bonded as we improvised a scene in the comments to one of his posts in real time. Bill was trying to bring twenty-four cans of SPAM onto an airliner. I was a TSA agent explaining to him that he couldn’t because the gelatin around the pink meat qualified as liquid.

Shortly after that random encounter, I invited him to come and read from his work at the University of Georgia. He was gentle and genuine, and he was one of the funniest people I’d ever met. Within a day, we hatched the plan for the book that became Restless Spirits, the third anthology of his plays, which I edited.

[Read more…] about My Friend Bill Yellow Robe

Women and the Making of Ulysses: A History in Ten Objects

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by CLARE HUTTON

This article is devoted to objects that tell the story of women who supported James Joyce and the publication of his landmark novel, Ulysses (1922).  They were previously on display in our exhibit, Women and the Making of Ulysses, curated by Dr Clare Hutton, author of Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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Interpreting “Fringe” in the Mel Gordon Papers

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Mel Gordon’s Notes on Expressionism with 1917 clipping, Mel Gordon Collection, Box 12, Harry Ransom Center.

by MACAELLA GRAY

In 2018, The New York Times lauded historian, curator, and writer Mel Gordon as a “drama scholar of the fringe.”

At first glance, the so-called “fringe” certainly seems to find a home in the Mel Gordon Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, with materials ranging from anthologies on erotic dance to German and French adult magazines.

Mel Gordon earned his PhD at New York University in performance studies and taught popular classes on theater at UC Berkeley throughout the 1990s. Focusing on histories of 20th-century sex and eroticism, mysticism, horror, and spectacle, Gordon wrote Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin and Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946—earning him a reputation as a “provocative, risqué storyteller.”

Based on his book titles alone, one can see how Gordon’s language tends to sensationalize 1920s Berlin and Paris—epochs often mythologized with tales of crazed sex and loose morals. However, at the heart of Gordon’s scholarship lies a contradiction: he challenges historical mythologies as much as he contributes to them. Gordon often questions the perceived marginality of the communities and figures he writes about, including the German silent film actress, dancer, and poet Anita Berber.

[Read more…] about Interpreting “Fringe” in the Mel Gordon Papers

ABOUT MACAELLA GRAY

Macaella Gray received her B.A in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and is the Visual Materials Intern at the Harry Ransom Center. Her research lies primarily in the modern and contemporary arts, with a focus on early queer histories, post-war print media, and experimental film cultures. She is also the recipient of the Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize and the John F. Newnam Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art and Art History.

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