Foundry Press

Foundry's jacket portraits arrived from thirty different sources a year — author-supplied headshots, decade-old press photos, one memorable webcam still. The books sat together on a shelf; the faces on their jackets didn't. They needed portrait coherence without flattening thirty very different people into one house expression.

One repeatable setup: single window-quality light, a grey canvas that travels rolled, three poses, twenty minutes per sitting. Short enough that nobody has time to get self-conscious, structured enough that a novelist shot in March matches an essayist shot in November. Sittings were batched at book fairs and the publisher's office so no author had to make a special trip.

Thirty coherent jacket portraits a year from a setup that packs into one suitcase. The spines already matched; now the people do too — without anyone looking like they were processed.