Judith Aronson showcasing some of the most famous writers of the century at UCC

Her photographs of writers, actors, artists and film-makers, currently on exhibit in UCC’s Boole library, encompass 30 years, vividly capturing the cultural life of the age.

Aronson, however, does not consider herself a portrait photographer in the strictest sense. “I am a photo-journalist, not a portrait photographer, and I’m a graphic designer by training, ” she says.

While she finds the work of portrait photographers such as Annie Leibovitz “fascinating”, she says she has never wanted to “art- direct” to this extent. For her, the pose and setting is not as important as the character of the subject and often, their interaction with others.

“It helps me for people not to look at me. I don’t like portraits where people are looking at you, they look too posed. We get to know more about people when they are interacting with somebody,” she says.

Aronson was born in New York and after working for the Peace Corps and the civil rights division of the Justice Department, in the late 1960s she enrolled with Volunteers in Service to America and was assigned to east Harlem where she lived and worked for two years. After a stint in city planning school at Yale, she completed a masters in graphic design.

“I had never held a camera in my life before that. Walker Evans was one of my teachers. It was just being in the right place at the right time. My children make jokes about me being a hippie but I said I couldn’t work for the federal government and be a hippie; they say ‘you were at Woodstock, Mom, and you were in Vietnam during the war’.”

Aronson travelled to Vietnam with her first husband, a civil rights lawyer who was working on a public service project there.

“As soon as I got my degree in graphic design, I left America. Any sensible person would have stayed and got a job. I was more interested in adventures.”

After leaving Vietnam, the couple stayed on in south-east Asia, and Aronson ended up in Singapore working for Hans Hoefer, founder of the Insight travel guides.

“I was his assistant, taking no photos but sorting through thousands of pictures and picking ones for the guidebook. I learned a lot about what makes a great picture without actually taking any,” she laughs.

The couple separated and Aronson returned to New York, where a new chapter of her life began when she met her husband, Christopher Ricks, the legendary English literary critic who went on to become professor of poetry at Oxford.

“When I returned to New York, I stayed with my former college roommate which is how I met my present husband; she married a student of his. We are still together 42 years later.”

Aronson, who had been working on photographic assignments for publications including Ms magazine, later moved to England with Ricks. Her first job there was with the Telegraph newspaper, photographing unusual shops in London. Later she was given an assignment, photographing the subjects of the newspaper’s popular ‘My Sunday’ series.

“Famous people were asked to write about what they did on Sunday, it was one of the best jobs I ever had,” says Aronson.

Some of these photos feature in the exhibition, including a charming portrait of actor Ralph Richardson with pipe in hand standing next to a grandfather clock.

“He wound up his clocks on Sunday, he had 12 clocks,” says Aronson. “The writer Polly Devlin, Seamus Heaney’s sister-in-law, wrote about the fact that all her children jumped in her bed on Sunday mornings so I said ‘Well, I guess I have to photograph you in bed’.

"She said yes but her husband refused. She is in bed and the children are leaping all over the place, it’s a great picture.”

The exhibition is accompanied by Aronson’s book Likenesses, in which the sitters write about each other.

“The publishers said they needed some text but I told them I wasn’t much of a writer. I brainstormed and came up with the idea that all of these people knew each other so why not get them to write about someone else in the book. I wrote to them all, one or two weren’t alive, and I asked them to write about someone else in the book. I was surprised that something like 20 people said yes.

And so, a portrait of Cork poet Greg Delanty at Aronson’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is accompanied by text from Seamus Heaney, while Salman Rushdie contributes on Saul Bellow.

Two portraits of Rushdie feature in the UCC exhibit, a face-on more formal shot, and another of him sitting at his typewriter with his young son, Zafir, not long before he won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children.

“The first portrait was for the London Review of Books, it wasn’t the kind I usually take,” says Aronson. “The one with his son was my kind of picture. While I’m there, I always take a shot of what I want. Rushdie was very nice. One of my missions in the last two or three years has been to get all of these people to sign a copy of my book. Last year, he invited me down to his apartment in New York and signed my book.”

While many of the portraits Aronson was commissioned to take were of famous men, she says she was conscious of not making them the main focus. Many of the portraits she has taken feature the subjects with their wives, partners or families.

“I try not to make them the most important thing in the picture. Often, I don’t think you can tell who is the most important person in the picture. I try to make it about the two of them, they are double portraits, they are not about the famous person.”

One of the portraits that is notable in this regard, is that of poet Geoffrey Hill, with his wife Alice Goodman, who is holding sheets of paper in her hand, which Aronson says were notes on another cultural milestone.

“She was writing the libretto for Nixon in China, which she is working on in the picture,” she says.

“She is looking at Geoffrey, Geoffrey is looking at the cat, and the cat is looking at me. There is usually some kind of movement in my photographs.”

While Aronson teaches graphic design at Simmons College, Boston, she is not a huge fan of digital technology when it comes to photography.

“I don’t think there is a digital picture here [in the exhibit],” she says. “I don’t crop my pictures. This is how I saw it through the lens.”

Likenesses: Portraits of Literary and Cultural Genius, an exhibition of work by Judith Aronson, runs at UCC’s Boole Library until March 30.

Copies of the accompanying book are also on sale.