The faces behind the words tell stories too

Photographer Nancy Crampton recalls her encounter with Truman Capote, the author of “In Cold Blood,” as particularly poignant. “This Capote,” she says, indicating a framed portrait on the wall of her Greenwich Village apartment, “it’s a well-known photograph. This was 1984, just three months before he died.”

Throughout Crampton’s home hang the black-and-white portraits that have made her the photographer of choice for writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Alice Walker.

For Capote, Crampton telephoned his editor and told him she needed a photograph for a gallery show in the Hamptons, where the author lived. To her surprise, Capote called her, and they made an afternoon appointment in the city. “I’ll be sober by then,” he said.

They met at his hotel, and as they walked to a nearby park, he lamented his unsuccessful attempts to dry out. “And he said, ‘But the mind is still there,’ ” Crampton recalls.

With Capote seated on a park bench, “I started taking pictures. And then there was this wonderful moment when he really came through -- and we both knew it. You know. It was rather moving. And I took a few pictures after that. But that was it,” she says. “I had my picture.”

The Capote photo is one of about 50 being featured in an exhibition at the Los Angeles Central Library (through April 2), as well as shows this fall in New York and Boston. The photographs, of such literary notables as W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Heller, Gloria Steinem and Anne Sexton, are drawn from “Writers: Photographs by Nancy Crampton,” due out in October from Quantuck Lane Press.

The exhibition and book both pair the photographs with the writers’ comments on their craft, many from Paris Review interviews. The texts, evocative in their own right, were selected by Crampton with the aid of her late husband, the New York restaurant critic Seymour Britchky, to whom the book is dedicated.

The late George Plimpton, the playful journalist-athlete who was also editor of the Paris Review, for example, discusses his nightmarish attempt to pitch to the pros at Yankee Stadium. “Whatever the humiliations,” he says, in a nice precis of his career, “if one remained the observer, what one experienced and learned could be set down later.”

He is represented in the book by Crampton’s 1977 photograph showing a mock-serious Plimpton staring down at a cat wedged incongruously between two steps of a spiral staircase. “Obviously,” says Crampton, “Mr. Puss wanted George’s attention too.”

Former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand has suggested that Crampton, a handsome, slim, silver-haired woman who prefers not to reveal her age, charms her subjects with the quality of her attention. Crampton picks up “Writers” and, without shyness or false modesty, reads an excerpt from the foreword by Strand -- about how she creates “pictures that magically combine the immediacy of a snapshot and the premeditated calm of a portrait.”

Crampton’s photographs are “real masterpieces of portraiture,” says David Dearinger, curator of paintings and sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum, where the works go on exhibit later this month. Dearinger compares Crampton’s head shot of Saul Bellow, with its enigmatic humanity and vulnerability, to the qualities of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

To Michael J. Barsanti, associate director of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, “her portraits strike a really remarkable balance between formality and informality.” Barsanti adds: “Her subjects are always posing for her, but yet in ways that still are highly suggestive of their inner lives as artists. So her photographs have a real elegance to them.”

David Yezzi, director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York, which employs Crampton as its official photographer, calls her portraits “historic” and says that he is “amazed at the way in which she’s able to connect with writers and get them to open up.”

Says Yezzi: “She has this very open smile that comes over her when she brings the camera up to her eye. It’s a very inviting kind of smile -- so you wind up smiling yourself.”

Crampton’s home is a cramped and cluttered apartment in the red-brick building where poet Marianne Moore spent her final years. On one wall hangs an 1842 wedding portrait of Sarah Smith Garnsey, Crampton’s ancestor, seated on an Empire-style couch. Across the room is the ancient couch itself, a bit lumpy but still serviceable. A giant ficus plant adds a frisson of the jungle. A bookcase is filled with the works of authors she has photographed, many with warm inscriptions to her.

Crampton works most often with a Leica -- because “it renders light very beautifully, the lenses are wonderful, and I love the feel of it.” And she puts great stock in the notion of serendipity.

“Well,” she says, “a poet when he sits down to write a poem doesn’t know what’s going to happen exactly. Often. Usually. When you go out on location, you don’t know what you’re going to find or how you will use it for the photograph, and that’s part of the fun. And I think that the person you’re photographing appreciates the spontaneity of the experience. I appreciate it.... That’s why I really have fun when I photograph.”

Raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, Crampton attended Vassar College (like her mother and grandmother before her), majored in English literature and spent her junior year in France. After college, she worked in book publishing, and married and quickly divorced a Harvard-educated lawyer. A 1967 safari to East Africa launched her interest in photography, “really changed everything,” she says.

“It was a very beautiful experience, really idyllic,” she says. “And then photography’s so immediate. I found it irresistible: capturing life.”

Her early professional photographs were of children in ethnic neighborhoods, including the Lower East Side and East Harlem. Then, she recalls, “I was getting restless and I took my camera over to NYU, where [the poet] Allen Ginsberg was reading, and started taking photographs with my Leica. And during the performance, somebody passed me a note saying, ‘I’m a German journalist and my camera’s broken, please meet me at the break.’ So I did.”

It was the beginning of a partnership with a reporter she remembers only as Bernard. “Once he discovered me,” Crampton says, “he never took another picture.”

One day in 1972, “We said, ‘Let’s try Auden.’ And Auden was in the phone book.” While Auden conversed with the reporter in fluent German, Crampton captured the poet’s famously craggy face and his last few drags on a cigarette before he waved her away. “It was very exciting, of course,” she says. “You understand I was paid $35. That was more money in those days.”

Along with writers, Crampton photographed many artists, creating a celebrated portrait of the sculptor Alexander Calder at work in his studio. She told one artist’s wife that her project was to photograph “the old masters.” The reply: “Well, you’d better hurry up, because they’re not improving.”

There is, says Crampton, “a dimension of time in photography,” which makes “all of these photographs ... more meaningful now than when they were taken.” She points to one of the portraits on the wall behind the couch.

“I can look at that photograph of Anne Sexton,” dating from 1973, she says, “and I never get to the bottom of it. But, you know, a little over a year later, she did commit suicide. Which everyone knew was quite inevitable.”

When Crampton arrived at her Weston, Mass., home to photograph her, “she informed me that she was going to the mental hospital the next day.” Nevertheless, Crampton said, “she was quite outgoing. She was very engaged in the session.”

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‘Writers:

Photographs by

Nancy Crampton’

Where: Los Angeles Central Library, First Floor Galleries, 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays

Ends: April 2

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 228-7000, www.lapl.org