Notes from Source: In this unusual marriage of text and image, Terence Byrnes challenges, teases, and occasionally cooperates with the traditional author portrait, which he says is “a collection of ancient gestures that signal status, sincerity, and authoritybutis quite uninterested in beautiful – or even interesting – photographs.”” “Byrnes used his own background as a writer and photographer to create the portraits in Closer to Home: The Author and the Author Portrait. Over a period of ten years, he met with his subjects and photographed them during the course of intense and sometimes intimate discussions of writing and art. He was always aware of the disconcerting gap between the solitary act of writing and a marketing apparatus so fixed on visual images that one on-line literary agent states boldly, “The author photo is the single most important issue in your future professional writing career.”” “Reading Closer to Home, we glance from Byrnes’s brief and revealing stories about each writer to the accompanying photograph and we arrive at a new way of looking at both writers and photogtaphs. For a moment, we feel we have met the author personally, and that meeting has shown us something about the oddly elusive yet highly recognizable nature of identity itself.