The Private Lives of Famed Authors
Pictured in New Exhibit at Twain Museum

'Writers Unbound' Displays Photo Portraits by Jill Krementz

Ernest Hemingway may have best captured the essence of putting words on paper when he said, "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life."

Beginning November 16, the second floor gallery of the Museum Center at The Mark Twain House & Museum will be filled with the work of photojournalist Jill Krementz who has spent a career capturing on film personal insights into writers at home, at play, and, often, toiling alone at their desks.

Eudora Welty, Jackson, Mississippi, May 2, 1972

The exhibition, from the photographer's personal collection, includes images that have not been published previously. The exhibition runs through January 30, 2005.

According to Debra Petke, deputy director and Beatrice Fox Auerbach chief curator, and curator of Writers Unbound, Krementz's career as a photographer, journalist and author has given her access to the most renowned writers and luminaries of the 20th century.

"Jill has enjoyed unprecedented access to the leading writers of the day, often documenting them at their desks in the process of writing. The resulting photographs offer a unique and intimate insight into the creative processes of these preeminent writers."

Krementz is one of America's most acclaimed photojournalists and is considered one of the great author portraitists of the century. She has photographed nearly 2,000 authors and her work displays a passionate and unique visual style that demonstrates, according to John Updike, one of her admiring subjects, "people at peace in their settings, their activity, and their poses."

"I don't consider myself a photographer," Krementz has said. "I am an ecologist, really, since I generally photograph people in their own natural environment. I try to see beyond the moment and into the subject. I want to show the private side of people without violating their privacy. And without being too intrusive." As a voracious reader, film- and museum-goer, Krementz seldom photographs any writer whose work she doesn't also admire, Petke notes. "Jill brings to her sessions a familiarity with, and appreciation for, her subject's work. Perhaps because of this empathetic predisposition, she can invade a writer's home turf and document his or her life and inner sanctums in subtle ways, capturing Walter Mosely writing longhand, a cat peering from the lap of Joyce Carol Oates, or a dog skulking beneath Stephen King's chair." Updike says Krementz captures "an ordering and a purging and a bringing into the light that which had been hidden an hour before."