The first time an editor asked me for “a headshot,” I had to google it. Accordingly, the term originated in the movie industry to describe a standard 8″ x 10″ professional photograph of an actor, taken with specific parameters, and submitted to a casting director or producer in the hopes of booking an audition based on the first impression of their looks.

To book is to bill.

A booking (n.) is an engagement for a performance by an entertainer.

A book (n.) is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover.

A publication (n.) is a book or journal issued for public sale.

For writers, a headshot (n.) is the standard photo requested by publishers prior to a piece's publication in a journal or book.

As a visual component of marketing, the headshot serves as a possible point of sale.

I change headshots more frequently than some mammals change their boxers—restlessly, constantly, driven by a mixture of intrigue, devout uncertainty, and dread. Like nail-biting, this compulsive shot-shifting is bad for my brand. It prevents consumers from relating to me as a recognizable product.

What does it mean to recognize a produced self?

When someone refers to me as a blonde, I don't remember who they are referencing. In my mind, I'm still brunette. I am often unrecognizable to myself. Surely I’m not alone in this.

There are 117 photos in the folder marked HEADSHOTS on my laptop. Among these photos: seven camellias in varying shades of light, a glacier as captured by my dead mother, a small dish with ash from a manuscript, an assemblage of acorns, the back of my head on a metal slide, three MRI images of my brain with contrast, a green cardigan, a silhouette of me kicking seaweed, a passport photo, the Krakow nude, me in grass, me in meadows, me looking tired, happy, distracted, surrounded by notebooks . . .

Real estate agents emphasize curb appeal, or the attractiveness of a property for sale and its surroundings when viewed from the street. Landscaping, the front entrance, and the condition of the paint or siding are the biggest factors in curb appeal. It's the outside of the house that makes the buyer decide whether to enter.

In "People Judge Your Book By Its Headshot," author Scott McCormick insists that “the goal of your author headshot is to cement your brand.” The headshot is aspirational: it aims towards a genre-specific creme brulee of professional glamour, aesthetic proximity, and iconography that leans on looking. Since publishers have deemphasized cover art, the headshot emerges as a selling point for buyers.

People don’t judge a book by its cover, but by its headshot.

P. took my first headshot in a ruinous Alabama cemetery on an outing with the kids. The image on the back cover of the debut fiction collection has its author glaring at something outside the frame, her face troubled by shadows (bad lighting), a torrid braid perched on her home-bleached hair, a gangly magnolia in the background. One wishes she knew better. One wishes, for example, that the author had experimented with display techniques to augment the visual experience for online marketing efforts. The dark circles under her eyes — ghastly.

As we train our puppy to cease pissing on house plants, P. begins a conversation which connects my headshot-horror to a fear of failure, particularly, the failure to be glamorous, the inability to appeal to others.

“Bullshit,” I tell him— bullshit being the gauntlet that leads me deeper into studying this object, this professional set-piece, the headshot.

When my son turned five, he began reading billboards and signs aloud.

I remember his puzzled little forehead, the mind reaching for words: "Mommy, these smiles are trying to take something from me." This awareness of how smiles can be predatory was first offered to me by a child whose neurodivergence makes him, in many ways, a better cultural anthropologist than the articulate pedants of neurotypical hallways—o, hallways, maybe one recalls the predation of high school femmes asserting their smug grins in the silence that follows a whisper session. This has nothing to do with anything except the sound of a young voice singing We have affordable curves as I drove.

Why do I smile when I enter a room?

"Is to see you to feel you or keep you at an unthreatening distance?" Mary Cappello wonders in her memoir, Awkward: A Detour.

In a room stocked with strangers, the smile asserts its own confidence. The smile may be a social badge of having arrived; power comes from the ability to offer the least determining smile in the headshot; the smile designates this particular relation. For me, that is the problem. The headshot promises a sort of relationship that can only develop into iconography.

Roland Barthes described the iconic gaze as the one which looks directly at the viewer— the one whose dead eyes insist on their aliveness. Eastern Orthodox icons witness the doings of a house; I grew up surrounded by their eyes and golden aureoles. Perhaps this supernatural element is what I wish to revoke of myself in recusing the representation of motionless and eternality.

If I’m not twitching with restlessness, the headshot is lying. It presents an unrecognizable self—-a self too polished, professional, surreal, or else too intimate, expository, torn from the sacred corners of my private cathedral. Is it the confessional that scares me? Cappello notices the subtexts of smiles when visiting Russia on fellowship, when a man tells her that she is putting herself at risk by grinning—better to look solemn and "normal." The normal varies across cultures, social classes, time, and language. What is normal today will be the ramparts of nostalgia tomorrow.

"In Sicily, the sun doesn't shine," Cappello says, "it burnishes." The light of time and place changes the way we behold the body; the headshot denies this contingency; it universalizes the writer by holding us in one shape, one light, one moment, for all eternity. Is a headshot a portrait? I could write a book about this perhaps . . . an inventory of how we see one another in the altering 21st century lights.

The policing of professionalism existed prior to the headshot. To take sides in the aesthetic headshot wars is to color the scene with ethical undertones while descending into visceral personalization of critique. God forbid one wakes up worthy of a hashtag on the social media marketplace. As they say in po-biz workshops for authors, brand is everything. The criteria of value is excellence. Honey: money talks.

Headshot discourse has evolved into a close-reading exercise wherein the author's image is decoded as a statement of artistic purpose, a development of brand, an aesthetic gesture, an opportunity to be solicited for features in journals or television.

“Look—” I tell P, “the headshot has a hook for a heart.”

Enter the at-home studio—-a variety of pen lamps with magnificent wattage, mood lighting so that authors on a book tour can take courses on how to look good on Zoom. What follows is a non-exhaustive inventory of things I've read or been told in the industry of headshot acquisition:

Investing in a professional headshot is a way of showing respect for the reader. Showing up with your hair a mess tells the reader that you don't value yourself or your work. The social media headshot should be more approachable than the book headshot in order to provide readers with a sense of intimacy: by following you on social media, they get access to a rawer version of you. When getting ready for your author photos, think of how you’d like to appear when meeting your reader in person for the first time. For the book photo, dress like other authors in your genre, which is to say, novelists ought to look more professional while poets can milk the constellations for whimsy and a slight bohemian aura. In order to keep your brand fresh, one must update your headshot every two-to-three years. If you invest in a grainy headshot, that image will follow you around for eternity. At all times you should be asking yourself, “What kind of image am I trying to project to the world?” In the mall of desirable books, every image counts.

The headshot is a glimpse of the person at their Sunday best; or as they want to be imagined; or as , or the self most amenable to markets – I'm not sure that we know which is which. As writers, I'm not sure we have time or financial incentive to consider it. I don't want to stop long enough to become a brand.

“Are you still obsessing about headshots?” P asks, as the deadlines and stacks encircle me.

There are so many Annes that I am, and so many Annes I resemble, without filling definitively —-

In my search for the perfect headshot, I watch a microvideo lesson for authors on how to take your own headshots; learn about Hilary Mantel's pensive, caped headshot; discover that moody black and white headshots are hot; find that professional headshots are harrowing for the anxious or introverted; wander through hilarious twitter self-parodies of author headshots; get stalled in the indignance of authors whose publishers rejected their chosen headshots.

A typology of headshots emerges: the realistic headshot (which constructs subject as unassuming, unsentimental and sincere); the bohemian headshot (which constructs the subject in opposition to bourgeois aura and interposes the author in counterpoint to the system that publishes him); the whimsical headshot (which constructs subject in relation to fragility of planet and natural world altered by climate change); the assertive headshot (which constructs subject as powerful, reclamatory, and serious); the sexy headshot (constructs subject as eager to be visible in a sexual way, or engage in self-objectifying lens); the regional headshot (constructs subject in relation to geographic terrain and placehood) — all of these constructions rely on an overdubbed mixtape of fantasy and nostalgia which is critical to the capitalist-realist aesthetic gaze.

The fantastic subject of Walter Benjamin's 19th century flaneur has become the oversaturated subject, but the iconographical aspiration is the same. Part of this can be traced to the predominance of the visual in current marketing discourse: the proliferation of posters for book tours, the coordinated visual palettes and themes related to books themselves, the emergence of the book t-shirt grounded in aesthetic love for a book rather than articulation of theory. This is just business as usual in hypercompetitive markets where so much depends on being memorable.

Benjamin gestured towards the market-friendly aesthetics when describing the broadening role of ad-space in 19th century newspapers, particularly with respect to the prestige of the reclame. A decrease in subscription rates, news items, serial novels, and advertisements altered the role of newspapers.

Of newspaper ads in the mid-19th century, Benjamin complains that the ad took up more space and was better designed than the copy around it, so that even when the product was criticized in an editorial, the effect was negligible. Suddenly to be out of date was to be out of fashion —- a sin against the present time.

The news items caught on because they could be employed commercially. Reclames, independent notices masquerading as news items, referred to products that were advertised in the paper. Although they were denounced as irresponsible and deceptive, their use underscores the increasing connection between advertisements and paper sales. These short news items and different typefaces allowed the papers to have a different look every day, pre-disposing their daily purchase, and making them appropriate compliments for the newly defined cocktail hour— the ultimate in non-serious gossip that had become institutionalized in the cafés.

10.

Artists are not new to capitalist realist aesthetics: Marcel Duchamp's avant-gardism borrowed from mass consumption's planned obsolescence without disavowing the artist's protest at being reduced to a mass product. If Duchamp gave us the found sacrilege, Andy Warhol gave us the precursor to LOL with his painstaking cultivation of public persona to accompany pop art. Set design, lighting, color theory, all came into play in the mythos of Warhol.

We spectate ourselves being spectated by others in order to perform the spectacle of the book launch. We lie to ourselves and locate these gazes in a subset of the numinous or authentic, rather than the commercial. We writers have been lying to ourselves since the pen first graced the page to placate our wild imaginations.

The brand is modernity's version of the icon—a holy image—the secular divination of market forces in action. The iconic headshot sanctifies the latest viral surge. Perhaps it is this fear of being sacralized, or remembered, as the brand, that worries the iconoclast in some of us. What's the point of getting rid of gods if only to insert one's self-image in the hole?

On this reading, a good headshot would be a lie—it would suggest that this self has fit in an image worth remembering, rather than reflecting the incoherent noise that I am. Remember me, instead, as a consort that never managed to settle into a pose worthy of deification. Remember me as a flibbertigibbet who couldn't remain motionless long enough to warrant your time or purchase.

11.

If I query the headshot, it is to understand my own discomfort with it, or to locate it in relation to my discomfort for icons and monuments in landscapes saturated with the crimes of nationalism and theocracy. Because there is no such thing as a wrong headshot – though there may be some that sell better than others—-I prefer to strip away any ethical readings from the act of interpretation, just as I strip it from personal aesthetic preferences ranging from piercings to plastic surgery to hair color.

The color of one's hair is not a moral position – certainly less so when it pertains primarily to females. Hair color is an aesthetic choice which often reveals trends and social practices of the time and place. There is no universal aesthetic, no such thing as “natural” once you put the first cream on your face. The natural, itself, is an evolving aesthetic criteria.

In theory, the image is just a tool, but there is no space carved away from the judgment of consumers, some of whom are human – and there is nothing lonelier than the pulse of one's aspirational event in the putative icon. Perhaps an “intellectual history” of the headshot is impossible. . . The Algonquin Round Table residents spoke in full knowledge of the persona as they performed for each other at the table: their epigrams emerged ready for quotation, stoked for viral frisson. Maybe the nice NYC cafe wasn't a way of life so much as an enclosed space and a way of being seen as the Intelligentsia. The cafe was the site of that branding.

The distance between gossip and insight is at the ear's discretion.

12.

Stanley Cavell calls it the illusion of the natural, or the candid — but is the headshot more candid than its textual apparatus, the resume? Which part of the resume is candid about interpersonal relations, or how many doughnuts one eats at the office party before wondering if others have had one? The resume, at best, is well-groomed—it sells itself. The headshot aspires to the same, give or take a wry grin.

13.

But there is a photo I love on the back cover of Brenda Hillman's poetry collection, Loose Sugar.

In this grainy, black and white taken by Louisa Michaels, the author sits before a white wall in a white tank, her lower arms hidden from view, her shoulders complicated by loose hair, her head tilted with an unassuming, close-lipped smile. The lines on Hillman's face are visible; the sunspots on her chest are an open field; there is a glare on the skin under her eyes. By industry standards, this headshot would be a flop.

After subjecting this photo to the usual close reading, I realize what I value is how little it reveals. How it could not, for example, sell a shampoo or a lip gloss. How it hovers for an instant in the air — a face, a simple snapshot of an author who has just finished writing, and who hopes to return to the page —- and who has paused, for a moment, to look at the world without fashioning herself into it. A sin against the times, the poem’s part-crime.