When, as a teenager, Mark Gerson said he wanted to be a photographer, his father told him the idea was “meshigas” – sheer lunacy. But Gerson went on to pursue his crazy ambition with a typical blend of modesty and tenacity. By the time the National Portrait Gallery marked his 75th birthday in 1996 with their major retrospective, Literati, Gerson had photographed nearly all the giants of the British literary scene. Of the 500 or so writers he had photographed by this time, the NPG exhibited 66 portraits. These included Evelyn Waugh, Doris Lessing, Walter de la Mare, Edith Sitwell, Harold Pinter, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, John Betjeman, Salmon Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, Kazuo Ishiguro, AS Byatt and Seamus Heaney.
Also on show was the famous photograph taken at a Faber & Faber party, where he had managed to snap a young Ted Hughes flanked by Stephen Spender, WH Auden, TS Eliot, and Louis MacNeice. He always regretted Sylvia Plath, who was lurking in the background at the party, was not included in the frame.
Mark Gerson was born in London on October 3, 1921, the youngest of three children. His father, Bernard Gerson, was a silversmith who had immigrated to London from Poland after a short period in South Africa, where he fought in the Boer War. In London he married Esther Miller, a girl from a large, well-established Jewish family in London’s East End. Gerson was brought up in Stamford Hill where he retained vivid memories of Mosley’s Blackshirts marching through the streets at weekends yelling antisemitic abuse as they waved their Union Jack flags. The experience made a deep and lasting impression and led directly to his lifelong support for the left and eagerness to join up and do his bit to defeat Hitler.
In 1940 Gerson graduated from the Regent Street Polytechnic with a first-class certificate in commercial photography. Soon after he volunteered to join the RAF where he hoped to use his photographic skills in reconnaissance work. But instead, to his frustration, he was trained as a wireless operator. However, he discovered an aptitude for Morse code, and eventually achieved the status of “leading aircraftsman” as a grade 1 wireless operator. At the end of the war he found himself near Buchenwald where his unit took local Germans to the camp to witness the abuses the Nazis had perpetrated. The experience was a profound shock. Some emaciated inmates, amazed to see a British serviceman of distinct Jewish appearance, greeted him effusively in Yiddish. But sadly he could not speak Yiddish and the memory haunted him.
After the war Gerson was at last able to make use of his photographic training, teaching photography in Paris for the RAF’s Educational and Vocational Training Scheme. After being demobbed he returned to London where he used his demob money to purchase a lease on a photographic studio near Marble Arch. Here he cleared away the rubble in the basement from wartime bombing and launched his career.
He met his future wife, Renee Cohen, at a Maccabi dance held by Golders Green Synagogue. Quickly realising they were both terrible dancers, they immediately took to each other, and married a few months later in September 1949. Two daughters, Ruth and Jane, came along in 1950 and 1953.
Gerson’s first literary portrait was of his aunt, the novelist Betty Miller (mother of theatre and opera director Jonathan Miller). She introduced him to the editor of John O’London’s Weekly, the popular literary magazine, (later Books and Bookmen) and Gerson’s photographs of famous writers started to grace the covers of journals and book jackets. In the following years an extraordinary variety of authors sat for him. Usually he would drive his old Austin mini carting a tripod, lighting equipment and a couple of Rolleiflex cameras to his various assignments. In 1966 he was awarded the Fellowship of the British Institute of Professional Photography and in 1967 moved to a small house with a huge studio in St John’s Wood where he lived and worked for the next 20 years. In 1967, Roy Strong, the new director of the National Portrait Gallery, acquired 80 of Gerson’s photographs for its collection (this has since grown to more than 270.) A string of one-man exhibitions followed, culminating in the NPG retrospective.
Gerson had a fund of stories about the writers he photographed, recalling with fond amusement for example, the time Waugh got him so drunk over lunch that he had to lie down before being able to take any photographs – much to Waugh’s great delight. That occasion resulted in one of Gerson’s most famous photographs with Waugh standing between two sphinxes to which he bore a striking resemblance.
Gerson not only admired his sitters, but nearly always genuinely liked them. He was careful to read their work and liked to detect visual clues to their personalities, which he observed with gentle amusement – Lessing smiling at her contented cat, Tom Stoppard pensively holding his thumbs to his mouth, AN Wilson purposefully wheeling his bicycle. After he photographed the novelist Barbara Pym, she noted in her diary, “Mark Gerson came to photograph me – a nice, easy to get on with person” and this quality is a hallmark of his style.
Gerson never aimed to depict his sitters in a harsh light. “It is much easier to take a cruel photo than a kind one,” he once said.
In the era before digital media, “selfies” and Instagram, his photographs depict a world that conjures the essence of 20th-century literary life. Carefully composed shots, invariably in black and white, that capture the inner life of his subjects with an unassuming yet penetrating eye.
Renee Gerson predeceased him in May 2024. He is survived by his daughters, two grandchildren and four great grand-daughters. Very sadly, his youngest grandchild, Daniel, died aged 39 in 2021.
Mark Gerson: born October 3,1921. Died: April 14, 2026
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