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In a photographic portrait of 1906, a seventyone-year-old Mark Twain poses assuredly for the camera in his signature white suit (Figure 1). A half-length portrait, the composition frames Twain dynamically, his seated body angled slightly to the right while his head faces left and his eyes look both up and outwards. As viewers, we cannot meet his gaze straight on, yet the tangible twinkle in his eye provides us with an exterior trace of the author's inner pathos. While we fail to gain access to his thoughts, the rather intimate composition nonetheless invites us to share in a quiet moment of contemplation alongside Twain. There is something familiar about this photograph, even during our first moments of its inspection. Taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a successful and prolific professional photographer, in her Washington, DC, studio in December 1906, the print offers up with seeming ease an iconic portrait of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).
Donning layers of white, from shirt and tie to three-piece suit and hair, Twain presents Johnston with a friendly challenge, formally speakinghow to capture the man in white in photographic shades of gray. Johnston responds splendidly with a sensitively composed portrait that captures Twain's material presence as well as his intellectual authority. Silhouetted against a backdrop of dark drapery, a fluffy mane of white hair crowns Twain's visage, his dense mustache and expressive eyebrows tempering the gleaming white with a touch of gray. A gentle light filters into the frame from the left, highlighting the texture and folds of his creamy serge suit. Twain wears the suit jacket unbuttoned, revealing the puckered fabric of his waistcoat beneath. He rests his hands in his lap at the bottom edge of the composition. Johnston employs a shallow depth of field, rendering Twain's face and torso in sharp focus while letting his hands, closest to the viewer, softly fade out of focus. Blurry yet discernible in Twain's left hand is the stub of a cigar, another hallmark prop of the septuagenarian. Undoubtedly, the unwieldy locks of hair and half-smoked cigar play supporting roles in Twain's pictorial staging of celebrity; it is the twilled white suit, filling almost half of the frame, which visually signifies "Mark Twain" for us as viewers. Slightly disheveled in coiffure...