A Literary Eye

“All my life I’ve been a huge reader,” says Miriam Berkley. It’s not the kind of comment you would normally expect to hear from a photographer. However, Berkley has turned her interest in literature into a career in photography. She had been working as a writer, writing book reviews and interviewing writers for leading publications such as The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Having grown up with a love of books her career suited her for a while. But she recalls being at a writer’s conference and feeling disenchanted with her career. “I was at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where I had received a scholarship, a considerable honor, in non-fiction, the area in which I had been publishing,” says Berkley. “But I was beginning to tire of writing book reviews and author interviews—I was widely published but got little feedback for my work. I did not live in the cities whose newspapers I published in; sometimes I felt like the work was falling into a vacuum. I knew I wanted a change without knowing exactly what that was—at the time I was thinking of poetry or children’s books. At the same time I was getting more involved with photography in general and since I was surrounded by writers, many of whom I admired, I photographed them. While two of my photos were used on book jackets within the next few months there was no conscious decision to become a full-time photographer at this point.” Berkley continues, “I had done a few author photos for publication by the book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, whom I accompanied on a few interviews he did before I myself began writing them. When I did my own interviews I did not bring my camera with me at first, but gradually I began to carry it more and more.”

She mentions one particular transition point when she interviewed and photographed a husband and wife crime-writing couple. “My interview appeared in three major American newspapers, usually with a photograph,” Berkley says. “I had spent about a week reading their books, preparing for the interview, and then transcribing the interview before even doing the actual writing. Within a few months I had sold a headshot of one of the authors for the jacket of a book and earned about what I had gotten for all three interviews put together. Within a year I had sold more jacket and publicity photos for this author and later sold a shot of the other. I had gotten no feedback on the interviews but many favorable comments on the photos. It seemed smarter and more fun to focus on photos.”

Berkley reasoned that she knew enough about the world of literature that she would know whom best to photograph and she already had contacts in the industry— publishers and her fellow authors. She has continued along that path for many years and, now, can rely on her archive and contacts within the industry to make it her primary source of photography income. She maintains a list of the authors that she has photographed, a veritable who’s who of modern literature including several Nobel Laureates in Literature winners, such as Gabriel García Márquez and Doris Lessing. “I’ve now photographed over 1000 writers from many different countries, and from all the continents,” Berkley says.

The market for her author photos goes beyond photos on book jackets. The photos also appear in textbooks and magazines. A good example of this is her picture of Stephen Hawking, the illustrious mathematician/physicist. She had made contact with Hawking prior to the publication of A Brief History of Time. It was a straightforward shot with natural lighting, taken right after a drizzle at Cambridge University in England, where Hawking teaches.

“The Hawking photo could not have been used on the jacket of the American edition of A Brief History of Time because when I met Hawking the cover was already designed. But when people from his publishing house saw my photo they liked it and bought it for publicity use; it was the first publicist who decided to crop the legs out of the image.” Though the photo shows a lot of the context of the campus, Berkley points out that the photo is usually cropped to some degree, and in some cases going so far as to crop out the legs.

Berkley elaborates: “A publishing house is generally not interested in presenting an artistic photograph—which is an important concern to me as a photographer—but in providing a photograph that shows the author clearly and sympathetically and is easy to reproduce in magazines and newspapers. My photos of Hawking were taken before some of the other editions of the book were published and were used on some of those covers. For instance, the Dutch edition used an image I shot as a vertical. Once a photo is sent out for publicity it is generally cropped by the publication to fit its space, which can be a big frustration to a photographer concerned with composition, as I always am.”

While she does intermittent marketing, sending her list out to publishers and paying her monthly subscription for her listing on the Publisher’s Marketplace website, it seems that her success in licensing her archive of images depends as much on being networked into the literary world as it is upon marketing. When authors she has photographed have new books coming out, they often will call Berkley to license the photo.

Berkley comments that it is increasingly common for the authors themselves to license the image. Only a well established writer with a fair amount of pull can count on the publisher to pay the licensing fee. Berkley typically licenses the images on a per country basis, resulting in further licensing opportunities when books are printed in foreign editions. Also related to the state of the business, Berkley comments that she has seen “payments for editorial photography begin to stagnate, at least in the United States, from both publishers and print publications.”

So, if being networked into the literary world is such a critical part of her business model how did she accomplish that? “I’m pretty familiar with the book world, although there are new authors coming up all the time,” she says. Which is why she regularly attends conferences, such as the Frankfurt Book Fair (the world’s largest) and local book fairs, as well. Such events, to which many people come from far-flung places, can be very convenient. “I look at the programs, I see who is publishing them in their own countries, and I talk to people. I ask them who is good, or a writer I have photographed will say, ‘You should photograph so-and-so.’ And even if somebody doesn’t get well known right away, if they are good, I figure it will be worth photographing them. To a large extent it is an intuitive process. I will photograph a writer whose work I like or whom I admire in some other way, or simply someone with an interesting face. Often I approach a writer directly, which is the easiest way of setting up a photo shoot. Serendipity can play a big part, as it did when I was just beginning and, on a flight from London to New York, sat next to an up-and-coming young writer with a thick address book; on my next trip to London I was able to photograph many of these people. Or I might meet someone at a party and take them outside for a few minutes or set something up for the next day. Since I am very fast, my beginning shots were almost exclusively outdoors and had no equipment to set up so I was able to build up a portfolio of strong images quite rapidly.”

Having a long-range perspective also guides her: “I photograph people I am interested in, who I think have some kind of international importance, even if it’s not immediate. I’m thinking in terms of the historical record, to some extent,” Berkley relates.

Her photography sessions can range from a few quick shots as a result of a chance meeting at a convention, to a location shoot in which she may employ some reflectors and portable flash. She says most writers are perfectly fine subjects except for a few who are jaded as a result of their success and, therefore, have had their share of cameras pointed at them. No matter whom she shoots, she finds that creating a connection with her subject is critical to making a good photo. Sometimes this is a result of engaging her subject in conversation though she is careful not to let her subject speak too much, as a mouth in mid-sentence can easily ruin an otherwise good photo.

Berkley’s fascination with people doesn’t begin and end with writers. In two recent bodies of work one can sense her fascination with people of all walks of life and what could be described as a humanitarian perspective. She has done a body of work in Cuba, a place that seems to be ideally suited to her personality, as she seems to thrive on the spontaneous personal connection with strangers on the street. Berkley has a knack for revealing something beneath the surface, whether it is a puzzled young girl in a dress, hand on hip, gazing up into her lens or three Havana schoolgirls in uniform, smiling and at attention before her camera.

Berkley has also been documenting Hell’s Kitchen, the area of midtown Manhattan in which she lives. West Side Story was set in this neighborhood, as well as other movies. Berkley is amazed at the pace of change, the gentrification, the socioeconomic extremes and the mere visual possibilities of this fabled New York neighborhood. And while she is aware of creating a documentary record of the changes to Hell’s Kitchen, it is done from an artistic perspective. What may catch her attention varies: “A chair left out on the streets, the pattern of light on the trees, the way a street looks at dusk.”

Other subject matter ranges from taxis to warehouses and, one day, while walking around with her Canon EOS 5D on the way to an appointment, she photographed a white horse in front of a red building in Manhattan! In an image of a discarded green arm chair in a sooty alley the once utilitarian object seems to speak volumes, almost as much as a homeless man sprawled upon the front steps of a brownstone. An image of five boys in a playground also seems to convey volumes about what it must be like to be a teenager growing up in Manhattan. Many of her photos hint at much more than the eye can see.

Berkley is clearly gravitating more toward street photography, and, as such, is making it a point to have a camera with her most of the time. It paid off recently when she was at a park, on her way to an ASMP picnic, and, for no reason that Berkley could discern, a man stood there hugging a tree. Berkley quickly captured the enigmatic image. She likes the questions that it asks and leaves unanswered. Much like this photo, her street photography often seems to ask the viewer to stop, think and wonder about this weird, wild and whacky world of ours.

Larry Brownstein is the photographer of the books Los Angeles, Where Anything is Possible and The Midnight Mission. He is represented by Getty Images, Alamy and other agencies. He has a growing wedding and portrait photography business. He also offers stock photography consulting and career coaching for emerging photographers. See his work at www.larrybrownstein.com or contact him at 310-815-1402.