A new exhibit of photography by Mark Morrow featuring some of the South’s best-known writers opens this week in South Carolina.
On August 31, 1979, photographer Mark Morrow sat down at his typewriter in Columbia, South Carolina, and wrote a letter to Walker Percy and invited him to participate in a book that would feature the South’s most iconic writers.
It was the first of hundreds of letters he would write over the next six years pleading with dozens of similarly celebrated authors—Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Tyler, William Styron—to let him take their portrait. Remarkably, nearly every one of these writers agreed to sit in front of his camera and were eventually collected in the book Images of the Southern Writer (UGA Press, 1985). Now, nearly 40 years later, a great majority of these remarkable photographs (along with a selection of the dozens of other author portraits he took along the way) will be on display for the first time at the Koger Center for the Arts in Columbia, South Carolina, from September 21-November 21.
The other writers he photographed during this time include celebrated writers such as Tom Wolfe, Joseph Heller, Tom Stoppard, Richard Hugo, Seamus Heaney, George Plimpton, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Garrison Keillor, Tim O’Brien and many others.
The exhibition takes the viewer along on Morrow’s photographic journey from the first photograph he took of author Tom Wolfe (taken for the USC Spring Writers Series, 1979-1984) who is shown in his iconic white suit, a smirk across his face and hands on a piano. Three-time National Book Award author Gail Godwin, the last photograph he took in the Southern writer series, is shown staring intently at the camera, relaxed, in charge and riding on the success of her new wildly popular novel.
The Southern writers project initially grew out of Morrow’s close relationship with novelist William Price Fox, whom he had befriended as one of Fox’s creative writing students. During a conversation one night, Fox told Morrow he was a better photographer than a writer and that he should pursue that career. Morrow took Fox at his word and soon embarked on the photography project that would consume him for the next six years.
Between 1979 and 1985, Mark Morrow photographed 62 Southern writers and most of the 37 writers who participated in the USC Spring Writers Series. The Koger Center for The Arts exhibition features more than 50 of these images. All part of an extensive collection of Morrow’s work (which includes more than 1,000 photographs, letters and related materials from the Southern Writers project ) that are now held by USC’s Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
According to the book Morrow wrote to accompany the exhibition, Photographing Southern Writers: An Unlikely Journey to the Soul of Southern Literature, readers (and exhibition viewers) are invited to join with these authors on their creative journey and find parallels in their own life. Morrow says it’s about “the journey itself and the savoring of all its myriad soul-moving, enlightening, cathartic moments of joy and wonder and delight.”
Through his lens, Morrow has given us not just portraits of writers, but a lasting visual narrative of Southern literature itself.
Photographing Southern Writers: An Unlikely Journey to the Soul of Southern Literature
September 24-November 21, 2025
Opening Reception: September 24, 6-8 p.m.
Koger Center for the Arts, Columbia, South Carolina
