• Menu

    What’s it going to be then, eh?

    The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
    About Anthony Burgess
    • Introducing Anthony Burgess
    • The Books of Anthony Burgess
    • The Music of Anthony Burgess
    Discover More
    • A Clockwork Orange
    • Earthly Powers
    • Anthony Burgess and Shakespeare
    • Dystopian Fiction
    About The Foundation
    • Our Mission
    • Visiting Us
    • The Burgess Bar
    • Support the Burgess Foundation
    • Join our mailing list
    • Contact us
    Anthony Burgess Archive
    • About the Archive
    • Visiting the Archive
    • Object of the Week
    • Contact the Archivist
    What's On
    • News and Blogs
    • Event listings
    • Venue hire
    • Burgess Prize
    • Exhibitions
    • Podcasts
    The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
  • What’s it going to be then, eh?

    OPENING TIMES
    Bar Open for events
    Reading Room Available for pre-booked appointments 10.00am - 3.00pm weekdays
    Office Hours By appointment: info@anthonyburgess.org
    HOW TO FIND US
    Engine House
    Chorlton Mill
    3 Cambridge Street
    Manchester
    M1 5BY
    Nearest train station Oxford Road More information
    Next event
    Talks: The Sex Lectures Sat 28 Jan 2023 7:00 pm £14.50 More information
  • The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
  • What's it going to be then, eh?

    Exhibitions. New writing. Concert commissions. Academic research. Public events, in venues and online. And at the core of everything, preserving and promoting our extensive Anthony Burgess archive.

    Your donation to the Burgess Foundation supports our mission to promote the life and work of Anthony Burgess in so many ways.

  • What’s it going to be then, eh?

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
NEWS AND BLOG POSTS

Portraits of Anthony Burgess: Liana Burgess’s photographs

  • Will Carr

  • 30th March 2020
  • category

  • Blog Posts
  • tagged as

  • Archive
  • Collections
  • Exhibitions
  • Portraits

"Photography as art is, like painting, concerned with suggesting movement... it wishes to give the impression of that personality existing in time."

We turn our focus to numerous photographs taken by Liana Burgess, held here at the Burgess Foundation, and how they provide a revealing record of the life of Anthony Burgess.

Liana Burgess was a keen and prolific amateur photographer. Using an Asahi Pentax SP1000 from the mid-1960s, her images make up a large part of the photographic collection at the Burgess Foundation and document both the home life of the Burgesses and their travels around the world between 1968 and 1993.

Our exhibition ‘Portraits of Anthony Burgess’, open to the public at the Engine House later in the year, draws on the many thousands of photographs that she took. Her pictures are intimate, casual and lively. Burgess is performing, delivering a lecture, being interviewed or reading from his work; and he is also shown in unguarded moments, relaxed with his family – and occasionally even smiling.

Together, Liana Burgess’s photographs are an important part of our unusually complete record of a working writer’s life. Burgess is pictured here working at home in Malta in 1970; and boarding a plane with his son Paolo Andrea.

Anthony Burgess writing on the visual arts is limited to occasional articles and exhibition catalogue pieces. Yet some of his work does concern itself with photography, especially in his 1976 novel Beard’s Roman Women: Liana Burgess is fictionalised as the character ‘Paola Lucrezia Belli’, whose photographs are critical to the plot and who is credited with the images that illustrate the text (in fact created by the American photographer David Robinson).

In 1980 Burgess wrote an introduction to Private Pictures, a book of paparazzi photographs, in which he says: ‘Photography as art is, like painting, concerned with suggesting movement; when it tries to capture a human personality it wishes to give the impression of that personality existing in time, not in the timelessness of the split second.’

Liana Burgess’s images of her husband give us a new impression of Burgess’s personality, captured nowhere else. Our exhibition presents nearly one hundred of her photographs, alongside many more from our collections. Liana Burgess’s self-portrait below was taken on the opening night of Burgess’s Cyrano musical on Broadway, in 1973.

Read more about our Portraits of Anthony Burgess exhibition here.

Read more about our portraits exhibition >

  • Share | 
  • Print
Related Blog posts
Inside the archive: Preserving Debussy Anna Edwards
Anthony Burgess and the Theatre: Cyranosing Andrew Biswell
Ninety-Nine Novels: The Once and Future King by T.H. White Graham Foster
Anthony Burgess and the Theatre: The Eve of Saint Venus Will Carr
SEE ALL NEWS AND BLOG POSTS
Go to home page
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Go to home page
Follow us

© 2023 International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Charity no. 1102623

International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Engine House Chorlton Mill 3 Cambridge Street M1 5BY
  • Site map
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms of use
  • Designed by Instruct
  • Built by OH Digital