{"id":547400,"date":"2026-04-24T01:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T01:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/547400\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T01:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T01:08:10","slug":"mark-gerson-photographer-who-captured-relaxed-images-of-britains-literary-lions-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/547400\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Gerson, photographer who captured relaxed images of Britain&#8217;s literary lions \u2013 obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Gerson, the photographer who has died aged 104, specialised in literary figures; from Somerset Maugham to Ben Okri, his portraits of British writers brought an unassuming skill and a sensitivity to character that transformed dust-jackets and magazine covers from publicity shots into enduring images.<\/p>\n<p>His flattering, unintrusive style was rooted in his own lack of malice and a commercial training that soothed customers\u2019 vanity. \u201cIt\u2019s very simple to take a cruel photo of somebody,\u201d he once said. \u201cIt\u2019s much more difficult to bring out their best side.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He encouraged his subj\u200bects\u2019 trust by photographing them in familiar surroundings that allowed them to be natural. His most memorable images caught writers off-duty: William Golding absorbed in his chess pieces, <a class=\"ck-custom-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/obituaries\/culture-obituaries\/1515927\/Dame-Muriel-Spark.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Muriel Spark <\/a>shopping in Peckham.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps his best-known picture shows Evelyn Waugh flanked by two superior-looking sphinxes. The photo was taken while Gerson struggled to recover from a surfeit of Waugh\u2019s claret and cigars. \u201cThe sphinxes had been bought to go on the roof,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI pushed them together and put him in between. It started to rain and he put the hat on. I saw the strange relationship between their faces and his. It was just one of those things.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Such a claim was typical of Gerson\u2019s modesty and belied a technique that was never haphazard.<\/p>\n<p>Mark Gerson was born in Holloway, north London, on October 3 1921. He served an apprenticeship in what he later called a \u201cDickensian\u2019 West End studio, whose darkroom doubled as a coal cellar. He studied commercial photography at Regent Street Polytechnic from 1939 to 1940, before serving in the RAF as a photographic instructor. After the Second World War he opened a commercial portrait studio in Marble Arch, rapidly learning to retouch imperfections and the signs of age when a middle-aged woman burst into tears on seeing an unimproved proof.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Gerson, the photographer who has died aged 104, specialised in literary figures; from Somerset Maugham to Ben&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,173739,1120,96,3879,2285,6487,26428,5438,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":{"0":"post-547400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-celebrity-obituaries","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-obituaries","15":"tag-obituary","16":"tag-photography","17":"tag-poetry","18":"tag-standard","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-unitedkingdom","22":"tag-us-content"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}