There’s a noble tradition in the book world whereby, after giving a frank and friendly interview to a journalist, the author suddenly turns into a sullen, unhelpful creature similar in demeanour to a leopard that’s just felt a trap close behind it. What triggers this change in personality? Would you believe it, nothing more alarming than the appearance of a photographer. The aversion many writers have to being snapped is inexplicable. It’s not a question of vanity, I think, but of some deeply engrained gaucheness. Those who are superb at expressing themselves on the page seem uncommonly ill at ease with the simple requirement of composing themselves for a picture. Maybe they live so much in a cerebral, imaginary world that a reminder of their physical selves – and the threat of that fleeting form being captured for posterity – is unnerving. Authors may be adept at taming runaway plots and the past pluperfect, but they’re often flummoxed when asked to marshall their arms or legs.

Twenty-odd years ago young photographer Angela Catlin produced a superb collection of 49 author portraits called Natural Light. It was a unique project, capturing the cream of the Scottish literati in their own homes. Quite apart from the nostalgic power this book holds today, many of whose subjects are now dead, Catlin set a benchmark for the writerly portrait, reaching into the hearts of her subjects and presenting them, still beating, on the page.

It has taken many years for her work to be in any way rivalled, but last weekend, at the Word Festival in Aberdeen I saw another collection that, like Catlin’s, overturned all the rules of bolshy writers and put-upon photographers.

Entitled Inspired, it comprises 25 photographs of Scottish writers by Iain Clark. Part of the Six Cities Design Festival it is hung in the University of Aberdeen’s Hub centre. The mood of each picture is so relaxed you could be peeping through a lighted window. As with Catlin’s haunting gallery here
is an array that reveals more than authors’ faces. A glimpse of who they are, and what makes them tick, is pinned, unforgettably, to the wall. Where Catlin used writers’ home settings to put them at ease, the trick to this exhibition was to ask individuals to pose with a design object that inspires their work. Alasdair Gray encapsulated the point of the exercise in the short description each writer gave to explain their choice: “Well-designed things, natural or manufactured, usually make life pleasanter, like good manners and other generosities.” His choice was his work space, a cabin-like cocoon of books that, in Clark’s handling, was imbued with a Dickensian quality of cosy industriousness.