We usually feel that writers should be read and not seen, but the portraits of West Coast writers taken in this century by Lynda Koolish have persuaded us otherwise.

And we usually let the work—of both writers & artists—speak for itself, but: Koolish is professor of English and Comparative Literature (specializing in African American literature) and director of the English undergraduate honors program at San Diego State. Her most recent book, African American Writers: Portraits and Visions, was published by the University Press of Missisippi last year.

Koolish began doing portaits of writers in 1972—Pat Parker reading from a sheaf of unbound poems to a group of women surrounding her in a grassy field at the first Country Women’s festival in Albion (just south of Mendocino).

She has begun to work on a 2005 exhibition at the Special Collections Library, UC-San Diego, “The Common Woman is as Common as the Best of Bread/and Will Rise: A Celebration of Three Decades of Feminst Broadsides, Poets and Presses,” for which she is curator, collector, and photographer. She states:

My photographs are a celebration of the passion, ethical and creative genius of the writers whose work I care about. My work is intentional, deliberate, passionately subjective. Despite the intensely personal quality of my work, it is, in its deepest sense, a collaboration. I try to listen with my eyes, pay profound attention to the self that someone else is revealing to me. There is a kind of Zen spareness in my portraits, the plainest possible backgrounds, natural light only, no gimmicks, no distractions, rarely even a visible context. As an artist, a photographer paints with light. How the subject looks psychologically and visually is determined by how the light falls, the way shadows form, creating and reflecting a sense of inner luminescence. I try to photograph at the moment of spontaneous convergence of what is visually exciting and what moves me emotionally. Sometimes, the photograph, like a poem, becomes a window filled with light.

Koolish lives in Berkeley, down the road from Milosz, and is part owner of a 56-foot wooden ketch she intends to sail to Papua New Guinea some day. See also: www.lyndakoolish.com