From Cup of Chicha:
Author photos for literary fiction — that most introverted of artforms — try to squeeze intellectual noblesse out of a writer’s physiognomy and convince us that “depth” has a surface appearance; thus, in my opinion, author photos are funny. And how funny they are is in direct proportion to how seriously they want to be taken. The more they try to signify “thought,” the more their authors look like what they’d hate to write: clich