![\"Five](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1f6d3373-238b-4bd3-9f8f-3fa681694e3f.jpg\")
Gerson\u2019s photograph of the Faber Poets: Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, TS Eliot, WH Auden and Stephen SpenderNational Portrait Gallery<\/p>\nTwentieth-century British writers were an eccentric bunch, which was usually a gift to anyone photographing them. Yet idiosyncrasy can veer into peevishness or waywardness, and some were more of a challenge to photograph than others.<\/p>\n
When Mark Gerson received a call from a literary agent asking if he might photograph Evelyn Waugh at his country pile in 1959, the offer was not an immediately enticing one. Waugh was a notoriously prickly man and his loathing of the press was well documented. Plus, Waugh didn\u2019t want to pay; instead, Gerson was permitted to take pictures of anything he liked and retain the copyright. <\/p>\n
Gerson \u201cagreed with alacrity\u201d \u2014 this was Evelyn Waugh, after all \u2014 and off he sped to Somerset with his wife in a beaten-up Vauxhall Cresta. Midway through the journey the car broke down. They called a mechanic and, after some trepidation, the Waugh household. The reply was frosty. The family was waiting for their lunch \u2014 could the Gersons be as quick as possible?<\/p>\n
The couple arrived an hour later to find Waugh\u2019s children sitting sullenly at the table and helped themselves to a plate of fish from the sideboard. Waugh muttered gruffly whether all photographers had to rush around in such an absurd manner, and after lunch he disappeared. Following a perfunctory tour of the house from Waugh\u2019s wife, Laura, the Gersons settled into the local pub for the evening and returned the following day. Again, no sign of Waugh, who curtly apologised later for not being present to point out \u201cmore interesting pieces of furniture\u201d. <\/p>\n
In the afternoon, Waugh reappeared in a merrier mood. Gerson took photographs of him smoking a cigar and writing with his ancient quill pen in his study, and shots of the family (including his son, Auberon, who was convalescing after accidentally shooting himself in the chest while on army duty in Cyprus). Evelyn requested no colour shots because \u201cI come out looking all pink\u201d. Gerson took no notice and later, when he presented the photos, Waugh\u2019s only comment was that \u201cthey will please the simple tastes of my Italian servants\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a letter, Waugh sternly rebuked Gerson for not taking more time over the dining room \u2014 \u201cit was careless of you to leave the gin bottles,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand not display more of the silver\u201d \u2014 and asked him to refrain from sharing his address to the rapacious press, but he enclosed a signed copy of A Handful of Dust.<\/p>\n
A flick through Gerson\u2019s portfolio is like a Who\u2019s Who of 20th-century authors. In the 1950s he photographed Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch and Harold Pinter, and in 1960 he captured a historic moment at a Faber drinks gathering: a photo \u2014 the first and only \u2014 of the poets Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, TS Eliot, WH Auden and Stephen Spender. Gerson later confessed that he had missed a trick by not including Hughes\u2019s wife, Sylvia Plath, who had been watching him as he snapped away.<\/p>\n
Gerson\u2019s photograph of the Faber Poets: Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, TS Eliot, WH Auden and Stephen SpenderNational Portrait Gallery<\/p>\n
The Sixties brought photographs of John Betjeman, Muriel Spark, Edith Sitwell, Anthony Burgess and Tom Stoppard. The following decade the literati roll-call continued with James Baldwin, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Patricia Highsmith \u2014 and on into the 1990s, when AS Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro and Seamus Heaney graced Gerson\u2019s camera. His photos were found on the dust jackets of some of the most celebrated literary works of the century.<\/p>\n
Gerson always read the oeuvres of his learned subjects and he liked to establish a good rapport so they would accept his invitation to be playful in front of the camera (Gerson once photographed Rudolf Nureyev on Waterloo Bridge, for which the ballet dancer had to clamber nimbly over a white bollard). He often chose props that elucidated something of their character: Doris Lessing with her cat, AN Wilson with his bicycle, Martin Amis leaning against a pinball machine and William Golding examining a chess set. <\/p>\n
\u201cLike the novelists he admires,\u201d wrote Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph in 1996, \u201che knows that personality is revealed not only in a face but in the unconscious gesture, in the way a sitter is dressed and by the room in which he or she chooses to be photographed.\u201d<\/p>\n
It helped that Gerson was a laid-back, gentle sort with an amused smile who rarely lost his temper. He always said it was harder to take a kind photograph of someone than a malicious one \u2014 and he aimed for the former, even if the circumstances were trying. <\/p>\n
Born in 1921, he grew up in Stamford Hill, north London, the youngest of three children of Bernard, a silversmith who emigrated to London from Poland after fighting in South Africa in the Boer War, and Esther (n\u00e9e Miller), who hailed from a large Jewish family in the East End. As a boy, Mark recalled Oswald Mosley\u2019s Blackshirts marching through the streets hurling antisemitic abuse; in the late Sixties he agreed to photograph Mosley, who told Gerson he was \u201cnever an antisemite\u201d. <\/p>\n
Gerson left school aged 16 and decided, against his parents\u2019 wishes, that he wanted to become a photographer, but the outbreak of the Second World War stalled his career. After graduating from Regent Street Polytechnic in commercial photography in 1940, he volunteered with the RAF as a wireless operator. He was later haunted by a visit to Buchenwald at the end of the war, when several survivors of the camp greeted him effusively in Yiddish (though he never spoke it).<\/p>\n
After a year teaching photography in Paris, Gerson returned to London where he took out a lease on a bombed-out studio near Marble Arch and set up as an independent photographer. His break came in 1952, when the literary magazine John O\u2019London\u2019s Weekly bought a photograph he took of his aunt, Betty Miller, a novelist and biographer who was married to the psychiatrist Emmanuel Miller (parents of the director Jonathan Miller). The magazine began regularly commissioning him to photograph other writers, work he developed from a studio in St John\u2019s Wood where he lived with his wife, Renee Cohen, a historian. She died in 2024 and he is survived by two daughters, Ruth and Jane.<\/p>\n
In 1967 the National Portrait Gallery bought 80 of his photographs. That number now stands at more than 270 and the gallery marked his 75th birthday in 1996 with a major retrospective, Literati, showing 66 of his best photographs \u2014 including one of Waugh flanked by two stone sphinxes in 1963, to mark the writer\u2019s 60th birthday.<\/p>\n
![\"Evelyn](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/356f590c-be65-48b8-98bc-ae21e822dbe5.jpg\")
Evelyn Waugh photographed in 1963 to mark his 60th birthday<\/p>\n
This time, Gerson had gone alone. When he arrived, Waugh, who was wearing the same dog-tooth suit and appeared distant, popped open a bottle of claret and offered him a cigar and a drink. He duly obliged, thinking it churlish to refuse, but within half an hour Gerson had a splitting headache, \u201cwas fit for nothing, certainly not photography\u201d and had to take a nap on Waugh\u2019s sofa.<\/p>\n
The predicament delighted Waugh, who \u201ccheered up immensely\u201d when Gerson woke up, gave him some aspirin and took him to the garden to show Gerson the two sphinxes he had recently acquired. They bore a \u201cstartling resemblance\u201d to the stony-faced writer and \u201cI put them side by side\u201d, Gerson recalled, \u201cand asked him to step into the middle. \u2018What\u2019s all this about?\u2019 He queried suspiciously. \u2018Just stand there,\u2019 I said. He glared. I took two shots and knew I had a winner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mark Gerson, photographer, was born on October 3, 1921. He died on April 14, 2026, aged 104<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twentieth-century British writers were an eccentric bunch, which was usually a gift to anyone photographing them. Yet idiosyncrasy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-687784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}