Published by Arena Editions in 2001, Christopher Felver’s The Importance of Being gathers portraits of prominent figures from several intersecting fields of modern culture. Artists and authors appear alongside singers, actors, activists, and spiritual leaders. Rather than defining an era through a single discipline, Felver constructs a broad human register of those who have shaped public, artistic, and intellectual life.

The book’s title directs attention to portraiture’s essential question: what, precisely, can a photograph disclose about a person’s presence? Across this extensive body of work, identity is approached not as an isolated theme but through comparison. A face follows another face; different forms of authority, performance, conviction, and creativity are placed in proximity. The significance lies in accumulation: each portrait stands alone, while the collection gradually reveals the variety of roles through which cultural influence becomes visible.

At 600 pages, this hardcover volume has the scale of a substantial survey rather than a narrowly framed portrait series. Its range allows Felver’s practice to be considered across many encounters and kinds of subject. The listed contributors include writers Andrei Codrescu and Luc Sante, extending the book beyond a photographic sequence into a meeting of visual portraiture and literary voices.

For collectors of photographic portraiture, the book merits attention for the breadth and density of its cultural record. It brings together figures usually separated by profession or milieu and asks that they be read within one sustained portrait project. The result is useful both as a monograph on Felver and as a cross-sectional document of modern cultural makers: a book whose meaning emerges through individual likenesses, but also through the company they keep.